“Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.” ― Andrew Sullivan, Blogger
So I’ve been blogging since seven this morning, when the cat woke me up with his insistent cries for food. I finally just went to get something to eat…a chorizo breakfast burrito (one of my favorite guilty pleasures) from Grilly’s in Mill Valley, washing it down with, you guessed it, Mexican Coke in a bottle. And now I’m taking a break from writing another post that’s giving me some formatting issues (this is an ongoing problem I’ve been facing using Blogger; sooner or later I will need to “migrate” this blog to WordPress, a process I’ve already begun by creating a URL over there) by writing this post. That’s right, writing to take a break from writing.
My workspace is almost idyllic; wood deck, wood table, green plants, orange cat sleeping nearby in a patch of sun. So why not truly idyllic?Opera from the neighbor, but that’s a story with which many of you are already well-acquainted and for the rest of you, I have been trying unsuccessfully to make a sound clip…My solution is that I’ve connected my speakers to my laptop and am listening to my 80s Love Songs playlist (yes, it starts out with Foreigner) to drown out my neighbor’s voice and it’s working….
Anyway, onward with my post.
What, exactly, is “blogging” anyway? I suspect that it’s different things to different people. For some, it’s… Wait a second, scratch that. I’m not even going to attempt to define what it is for anyone else.
Anyway, onward with my post.
What, exactly, is “blogging” anyway? I suspect that it’s different things to different people. For some, it’s… Wait a second, scratch that. I’m not even going to attempt to define what it is for anyone else.
For me, “blogging” is rather like scrapbooking. It’s a creative process that includes not only writing (and the whole writing “process” of editing, revision, re-writing, etc.) but also layout, design, photography, quote-finding, fact-finding, image-finding, copyright-checking, and more. It involves learning the intricacies and tricks of smart phone photography, using Bluetooth to connect my iPhone with my laptop (something I have yet to figure out), uploading, downloading, making Internet “posters”, translating from English to Spanish (which is really challenging for me) and from Spanish to English (easier), etc. etc. etc. At some point I suspect it will also be about social media networking, branding, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, goodness only knows what else. ; )
 |
| Sound clip (The principal of fair use ’cause these things worry me.) |
And I love it.
Corny, I know, but it fulfills me.
(Bwahahaha…this totally brings to mind Jerry Maguire…”You…complete me.”)
Someone recently asked me if I ever have writer’s block. The answer is no. Sure, in my lifetime I’ve experienced writer’s block, mostly in school when I was required to write something specific on demand, particularly something fictional. But the nice thing about a personal, non-commercial blog is that I write when I feel like writing, when I am inspired to write, when something moves me to write. And for whatever reason, since I began this blog in January or February of this year, I’ve been inspired to write on most days. In fact, my ideas run all over the place, so much so that while I have published 75 posts to date, there are also 37 in draft form waiting to be completed and published. It doesn’t help that I’m a bit of a perfectionist and hate to publish anything I consider to be “unpolished”, although I’ve gotten better at making myself do it. In fact, I am going to publish this one right now even though my natural tendency is to spend several more hours revising it (most posts take me from 6 to 12 hours)…
