Blogging block?

You may have noticed, I don't update here very often.

Well, sometimes I do. I've been doing pretty well since, say, Wednesday. Not daily, but I don't know that I want this to be a daily blog. Maybe thrice a week is a good benchmark? Or four times, if Wordless Wednesday is cheating. Which it might be.

Sometimes, I just don't know what I want to postulate on. Is writing important to me? Hell yeah. Is writing about writing important to me? Less so.


Writing, for me, has always been something I did alone. As a child, when I made up stories, it was when I was playing make believe by myself. Sometimes, I dictated them to my dad's boom box (and still have at least one of those tapes). Sometimes, I typed them on my grandfather's IBM typewriter. And there was that fantasy novel that I started writing in 8th grade and wrote throughout high school, and then when I got to college I realized it was awful. I still didn't pitch it until after college, but I didn't work on it anymore either.

In college, writing workshops were always interesting to me, while also always being a pain. I'm not enough of an egoist to say I was always the best writer in each writing class I took (all 3 of them....), but I was in the top 5. I say this based on my grade, based on what my peers were writing, and based on what the other peers whose writing I respected said. I don't even remember the bad stories of my classmates, just that they were very very bad, and I wondered why on earth such a person would be in a 400 level writing class. And why such a person would be asking me what words in my story meant. This was college. 400 level fiction.

Admittedly, I can get a little thorny when people discount what I've written because they "didn't get it". Or "don't know what that word means". That's not really my failing, is it? My points don't tend to be so oblique that, say, the other "good" writers in the class didn't get it.

Nowadays, I write. Sometimes a lot, sometimes not so much. Sometimes I send stories places. Occasionally a friend wants to read something I've written. I'm thinking about writing a dog training eBook to sell for The Elka Almanac; people write all kinds of crap on that subject, I wouldn't mind lending some quality to the genre. I may or may not have a collection of short stories going to print, we'll see how that continues to unfold. But, I don't really have any other writers I talk to. I don't have a group I workshop with, or anybody I swap stories with.

Do I want that? I'm sure it would be nice. Having somebody other than me lend an eye to something can be helpful. Compliments are always nice, and people who read your stuff tend to at least drop a few, for fear of seeming mean. It's a matter of making the time, obviously, and making the connections with a few people locally.

But yeah. I don't know what to blog about sometimes.