I’ve had blogs before. In fact, I’ve had many, many blogs before. So, one might well ask, why in the hell do I think I need yet another one?
I need it for a new beginning.
All my other blogs are hosted by a different service. WordPress is new to me, and so far I like it. The looks available are great and clean, two qualities that are useful when one is trying to reinvent oneself.
I started each of my previous blogs with a narrow vision for each. The first one I created in support of a radio show that I was writing and and developing and trying to sell. The next one documented my progress in writing a novel. Two more were devoted to political rants and social observations. Finally, there was one that was devoted to light verse, jokes, and other small humorous items. Perhaps they were too narrow, too segmented. I’ve never been a specialist, so perhaps specializing when it came to blogs was a mistake.
One of the best parts about blogging, for me, is that it tends to work like a writer’s journal. In the few writing classes I ever took, the idea of keeping a journal was always stressed as being as important to the writer as having a supply of paper and some means of forging words on it. It was to a writer what calisthenics were to an athlete (that will give you some idea of how old I am; I probably should have said “steroids” in place of “calisthenics”). It was exercise.
Well, I was never very good at keeping a journal. Usually, I would only make an entry when I was feeling blue, and the resulting multi-page moans were little more than embarrassments to me. And then I started blogging. Once I had an audience to write for, once my journal went from private to public, the quality of my entries improved. Gone were the self-pitying and adolescent scribblings of the days of yore. My subject matter grew, and my means of expressing myself blossomed.
This is not to say that every item was a work of art. No, actually, quite the reverse was true. When I looked over the entries after some time had passed, I found them to be flawed and in need of work, which is just the state that a journal entry was supposed to be in. Amidst the rubble I found rough drafts for essays, interesting notes and ideas that could be incorporated in other projects, and the occasional well-wrought phrase. For some reason, I needed to journal in the open in order to do it well even if my public was minuscule to the point of being microscopic. There are probably those who would say that I’m just a show-off, but I don’t think that can be proved without scientific testing and the testimony of experts.
And so I begin another blog, this one as general as the world itself. Unconfined in terms of subject matter, it shall roam where whim shall take it and go off from there whenever that gets boring. I don’t know where it will lead because it is just a journal, a writer’s journal, the kind of thing my high school writing teacher was always on about.
