Tuesday, June 8, 2010

You May Be Wondering Why I've Called You Here Today...

You may have noticed that I haven't been blogging much.  No?

Well, anyway, I haven't been blogging much.

When I started this blog, I was mostly looking for a place to publish my essay You Can Always Fry Eggs in Missoula, Montana, about my dad, as well as the book reviews I write for Gordon.  It was around when I realized that not only do I really like writing, but I kind of need to write to stay sane.  And I thought, I have a pretty interesting life, and some quirky ideas a few other folks might like, so maybe I'll write an essay or two a month, no big deal, and throw them up on a blog.  I didn't give much thought to craft, and no thought whatever to getting published; stuff just sort of poured out of me, and I hit "publish."

A year after starting this blog with such modest ambitions, I took a fateful trip to New York to sit on Patrick's couch in Harlem and I wrote for four days non-stop.  Okay, not totally non-stop, but I wrote a lot, and when I wasn't writing I was hanging out with other writers.  Since then I've been back several times, I've made friends with more writers, I've joined a writing workshop called Rittenhouse Writers Group, and I've gotten this idea in my head that I might be a writer of short fiction (though I haven't given up on the essay; I like the essay a lot, I will admit).  And while I still have fairly modest ambitions, I'm less inclined these days to write a draft and hit "publish."  Indeed, I'm relearning that the real work of writing is revising.  (I say "work," but really?  I'm a pig in mud.)

So I'm not publishing much on the blog these days, and what I am writing now I probably won't publish here, at least not until it has been soundly rejected by any number of other venues.  But I'm not ready to close up shop.  There are still my book reviews, with many, I hope, to come this summer.  And I want to finish the Midwestern Marriage piece, even though I don't have time now to give it much revision.  That will be going up in parts over the coming months -- and then?

We'll see!

2 comments:

Patrick said...

I'm so excited for you, Dear One. And I'm glad you're not closing up shop just yet too. Maybe the blog will have served its purpose, but maybe it will always be something of an incubator for new things, as well as a venue for the reviews and such. I'm at a similar point where I'm no longer sure I'm content for my blog to be first drafts. We'll see.

Marta said...

@patrick: let's see together, shall we? xo