Sorcha's Scribblings

Distraction -- or self-sabotage?

I dunno why this is so hard for me, but here is today's posting.

*sigh*

Well, so much for that. I slept all day on day three of my experiment. Hence this entry is 24 minutes late.

I wonder if I did it accidentally on purpose to blow this writing thing to smithereens?

In any case, I will recover -- and I'm not using one missed day as an excuse to blow off the rest of the commitment to myself.

Something to live up to

Scott did it last month, and this month, I will do it. I'm going to write a blog post every day. I think I need the discipline and to get back into the habit of writing here. Lately, most of my blogging has been on a World of Warcraft blog that is of less long-term interest to me than this one, but it's got the immediacy of having me be in conversation with two or three other WoW bloggers.

So instead of doing NaNoWriMo for the third straight year, thus resulting in three bad novels stashed away on a storage disk somewhere, I thought I would try a different type of writing discipline. Hence, 30 days: at least one post a day. I don't promise profundity or even humor. What I do promise (to myself) is that I will be here, daily, writing about what's on my mind. Even if it's World of Warcraft.

As it happens, what's on my mind today is starting this project. I'll let you know how it works out, probably at length over the next 30 days. I know from experience that disciplined writing projects tend to have surprising results for me. In any case, I am sure this will be good for me.

Speaking into the void

It's an extremely odd feeling to know that I am writing a journal that is both totally like every other journal project I've ever done (in that no one anywhere is reading it) and totally unlike it (in that if someone wanted to read it, well, here is it, out in public, with nothing to "protect" it from the prying eyes of, well, anyone).

I have mixed feelings about this fact, just as I have mixed feelings about this entire project. Look at my banner: I made it "quickly" in Photoshop today, because I wanted to have a specific "feel" to this page that doesn't come with the built-in templates. And after an embarrassingly long amount of time, I came up with something that looks like scribbles but isn't too distracting (I hope!) Now I am sitting here thinking, "That was a lot of effort for something only I will ever see."

In my next life, I will perhaps actually have an audience. Or maybe I won't want one. In the meantime, I will blog on forward.

Consider this a beginning

I suspect I always knew this would happen: one day, I would find myself creating a blog. As I sit here and type this first post, I have to wonder what I am doing, and why on earth this seems like a good idea.

Actually, you can blame this whole thing on DCJ. She and I have some crackpot idea that we are going to write a cookbook (and like some crackpot ideas, this one might actually play out in time). Since we live 1800 miles apart, she decided it would be a Good Thing for us to have a web location where we would work on our book. (If by "work", you mean "chat about what's happening in our lives, occasionally exchange recipes, rarely mention the book project, and swap sets of four questions". Interested readers -- like there are any -- can check it out here.)

Naturally, the book is going slowly, since we embarked on the project in a fit of IM madness when she was in the last stages of writing a dissertation and I was starting a program with the admittedly odd aim of getting a second master's degree (because, really, who can have enough useless degrees?). Since then, I've gotten a new job, she's acquired a new daughter (yay!), and she's also started building a new house. So what with one thing and another, the cookbook is not yet a NYT best-seller, or even written. We do have a draft of a book proposal done, which is something, I suppose.

Anyway, in the process of working on the LJ site linked above, we fell into a pattern of what we were writing about, and how we did it. Sometimes, I found that pattern constraining, and I decided I needed a blog of my very own. I'll get back to you later to tell you how it's working out for me, but in the meantime, I am engaged in the not-very-fun process of moving the LJ project to a new hosting service (so once the DNS parking is enabled, you will be able to read that project here).

As for what I am going to do with my very own blog: I have no freaking idea!

Consider this a beginning for which the end is totally unknown.