The Journey Begins

1, 2, 3 Attempts? Who’s Counting?

I have attempted to start a blog several times.  This is just one of those attempts. Sink or swim.

I am always in awe of incredibly talented and creative people and I often wonder how I can become like them.  I made a video for a history class and posted in on youtube; I wondered how people could post videos seemingly every other day when my very terrible historical video took weeks?  How do other writers knock out blog entry after blog entry every day? I go through the painful process of rereading and revising a piece that is not even a thousand words just to see if I have written in passive voice (which I probably have), committed the sin of comma splicing (guilty as charged), or some other God-awful grammatical crime.

I don’t know how they do it.  Tenacity? I have a ton of that?  Peace and quite? I doubt any writer has peace and quiet although we crave it.  So what is the magic recipe? Persistence and perseverance. Writers want instant gratification despite toiling away for however long we’ve worked on a particular piece.  I am very guilty of that. There is an urge to post something hot off the press, but those pieces are full errors and confusing sentences (if you were to look at my current projects you would probably tell me to give up on writing).

This is another effort to establish myself as a writer which, for me, is insane.  I am not a risk taker. I have a family and student loans to pay back. I am too afraid to buy a house because we won’t be able to fix a major disaster like water damage.  Sure, I can be brave, but that is different from being a risk taker. I make my decisions around the idea that the worst thing that can happen is that someone will tell me “no” or say they hate my work.  Since both of these have happened many times to me, I can handle it. Establishing a website and putting myself “out there” is entirely different. I made an investment in creating this site. Which means I could have potentially wasted money that I could use to pay back my school loans or buy my daughter something.  

Creating a blog is terrifying for me, who the hell will read this and why would they care? I can’t even get people I know to read my work, let alone, complete strangers.  What if I fail at the only thing I truly want to do with my life? What if I have been deluding myself into thinking I am any good at all?

I concede I will never be the next J.K. Rowling, William Faulkner, Stephen King, or Maya Angelou, or any other writer one can think of.  I just hope that some poor soul out there loves my work and that I make a difference. I can promise a set delivery on when I will have my next blog post up but I would be lying.  I pretty much only know when to be at work, get my daughter from daycare, and that I will have a lot of dishes to clean after my husband is finished with his cooking. The rest of my life is up in the air and I have no idea what I am doing, but I am doing it.