I know I really need to get on with it and start writing something, rather than continuing to write about writing. Or write about potential writing. But I wanted to jot down some of my reasons for starting this blog.
I started a mommy blog a few months back, to document my daughter Phoebe’s various accomplishments. Really it’s intended as a baby book, because we hadn’t actually started a baby book for her. (One obstacle was that we couldn’t find a baby book that we particulary liked. They tend to run quite saccharine. Or twee, which is a relatively new word for me.) So, the Phoebe Blog is really written for Phoebe, and also for various friends and family members to keep up with her goings ons. But as I worked on the Phoebe Blog, I discovered that I was enjoying the writing, and shockingly, found myself wanting to write about things that were not just about Phoebe.
I used to keep journals, mostly as a teenager. (My mother is an avid journal-writer, which I think is where I got it.) I like the idea of writing down my thoughts, and chronicling my life. I recently had a look in one of my journals from a semester I had as an exchange student living in Rio de Janeiro. I was expecting to relive some moments from one of the most interesting periods of my life. The problem was, it was boring to read. I’d like to think that my letters from that same period were more worth reading. I think I write better when I’m writing for an audience. (Whether a real or imagined one.)
Speaking of letters, I am, in some ways, a terrible letter-writer. It’s not that the letters I wrote are particularly bad. It’s just that they so rarely got finished. I have a box in the basement of my correspondances from the days before everything went electronic. And that box is about half full of my own half-finished letters. To family and friends who felt like I never wrote. Well, I did write. I just rarely mailed. (Not finishing things is a chronic problem of mine.)
I need to learn to write faster. I’m an academic, and I have a lot of writing ahead of me. I need to be able to get my thoughts down on paper (or what have you) quickly. And not get bogged down in the process. I need to learn how to bang out an abstract. And right now, I can’t even bang out an email. I edit, rework, etc. (I’m completely hopeless at IM, by the way. It takes me forever to compose a response, and I get left behind.) So anyhow, I’m hoping that by writing a blog, I will become a faster writer. (Yes, I am in part trying to justify this new way of eating up my time that I should be spending on my work.)
collecting tokens 