When I first considered a return to blogging I talked myself out of it. After all, I stopped blogging in February because I wanted to, in politician’s parlance, “spend more time with my family” ie: I wanted to focus on what kind of writing was more important to me (not actually spend more time with my family at all) and that kind of writing was the kind that was long form, fiction or non, published, paid? maybe? and you know. Serious. Serious writing. About serious things.
Yeah. Well.
One thing I do well, when I am not blogging, is write serious things. Not serious in the “be taken seriously” way but in the “wait, I thought she had a sense of humour?” way. When I take myself seriously I take myself too seriously.
Serious serious serious. Is there a word for where you say a word too much and it loses its shape like it’s butter melting on the sidewalk in the hot sun? Yes, for verbal use anyway, the term is Semantic Satiation which is a pretty wicked term. Also, I got that by google searching for “when you use a word so many times it loses its meaning” and that was the FIRST result. I love living in the Future.
Aside from writing things that didn’t so much zing as plop, I was not getting very much work done. I wanted to dedicate my previous blogging time to fiction writing and editing time and for some reason after the first couple of months, that time just got surplussed and given to other things. Twitter, mostly. Reading articles online. Other stuff.
I realized recently that the reason I don’t want to write my “serious” stuff is because I believe no one will ever see it. And without the potential of an audience I am not much interested in working on it. Does this make me honest, or a hack? Idiot, also an option. Because of course no one will see it if I never work on it, duh. Before I had a blog I had an audience of 0 and I still wrote my stories and poems and waited patiently for them to mature into lovely butterflies so I could share them with the world. Then I had a blog, and my little worms were getting attention and who the hell cares about those butterflies anyway. In sum: I have been spoiled by the instant gratification of writing on the Internet. And when I took away the blog gratification, I went to the twitter gratification because why write if no one is going to see it? RIGHT? Exactly.
What I should be doing is working (the phrase “toiling in obscurity” springs to mind and refuses to be quashed) and getting things ready to show to other, real, live people and their magazines, editorial boards, publishing houses, while there still are any. But all I want to do is dash off 500 words that are half-clever and have people see them and then go to bed happy because I am A WRITER WHO WROTE STUFF.
Wah.
After much soul searching and talking to myself in the rain, I convinced myself that blogging again would be a good idea because it would get me a little bit of gratification (methadone?) and that little bit would be enough to get me to sit my ass in the chair and work on the serious-but-not-too-serious-you’re-killing-us-here stuff.
Only problem is, I haven’t managed to find the time yet to blog AND write. Within the word choice lies the key: finding the time. That means it’s around here somewhere, I’ve just misplaced it, not that it doesn’t even exist. This is a positive thing. Today I kept a time log so see where my time is hiding and I will tell you tomorrow what I found out. Bwahaha, cliffhanger.