At the outset of 2015, back on January 1st, I made a plan to blog every single day of the year. Now in June I am nearing the halfway point and I haven’t missed a single day. I was worried at the outset that I would quickly run out of ideas or have to re-post a lot of old writing. But I hammered out a goal of writing 500 words every day… not rough draft words, but polished words that were as near to finished writing as I can get without obsessive-compulsive editing and the post-traumatic stress syndrome that causes. I found out that the more I write, the more the well refills with fresh prose needing to be drawn out in my daily bucket-full.
I am supposing that it doesn’t hurt that I have been in poor health and spend a lot of my day in bed where I do the writing. You have more time to write when you are limited in what you can do every day. For instance, wasting a day water-skiing is not really an option. Neither is mountain-climbing, tennis-playing, race-running. and acrobatic maneuvers in a space-plane. Well, I actually do some of that last thing… but only in my science fiction stories. Moose-chasing, pun-hunting, time-travelling, working elaborate voodoo spells, and swashbuckling are the things I really do… and I do them in my imagination.
It also really doesn’t hurt my overall goals that I am a cartoonist and I draw constantly. It gives me plenty of visual punch punch to fill up spaces between paragraphs, and I have real, honest-to-god professional writer friends that say the visuals are a key to good blogging now and in the near future. People respond more to the pictures than the prose.
I really can draw upon my life for topics. I recently read an article that claims stress and uncertainty in day-to-day life fuels creativity and writing efficacy. So that is good news for me. The house is falling apart. The weather has gone from a serious five-year drought to record spring rainfall. The ground our house is built on is shifting with the transition from shriveled to soaked like a sponge. So the foundation is cracking and the rafters will soon be landing on our heads. The flower garden that is the yard is turning into more of a jungle. I am in no condition health-wise to mow and maintain, but the city will fine us a lot of money I don’t have if I don’t do something to curb the jungle’s enthusiastic spread. And of course the dog produces five times her weight in dog poop every day. (Here’s that disturbing thing about poop references turning up in my posts again.) But the exercise I am forced to get from dealing with those problems on a daily basis is probably keeping my heart going and keeping me alive. And, besides, ranting about troubles is a source of humor and gives me something to write about.
Now, I started blogging in 2013 because my publisher at the time, I-Universe, told me it was a necessary part of marketing my book. They neglected to tell me that I would be the only one marketing my books and that I would probably never see a penny of profit in my lifetime from writing, but that’s the breaks, ain’t it? There is a very good chance that, even though I have been published more than once, and though editors say my writing is good, my books will never be read widely during my lifetime. I may get discovered along the way given enough time and endurance… but I may just be writing books for my own satisfaction and reading pleasure. It is the nature of the beast in this day and age that being a good writer and a mediocre marketer is a recipe for failure, while being a poor writer and a good marketer yields success. So, while irony is having its way with me, I would just like to say… blogging is now where I find my happiness… and thank you for reading my blog.
Catch a Falling Star 