Day 30: On Writing

I love writing; writing's a bitch. The cliche about the terror/tyranny/loneliness of the blank page and all that. Thirty posts in thirty days is hard, but don't break out your tiny violins for me. I choose it. This year when deciding whether to do NaBloPoMo it all came down to this: Anything that puts me in the chair in front of the blank page is a good thing. 

My hope was to create a habit, and then in December sit down every day and write something. I've got unfinished short story manuscripts, and a book project that needs a solid reworking. And I have in the back of my head a novel brewing. But life things are still unsettled and instead of being a distraction from life, life is a distraction from writing.

Make no mistake, writing a blog is an exercise in egoism. Most of us know our readership is small. Ansel Adams used to say that he photographed to please himself and if other people liked it, that was a bonus. That's true about all of art, I suppose. All I know is if I go too long without writing something I get really antsy. I also know that when I get really involved in a project I obsess on it. 

I don't know if I'll do Blog-a-palooza next year. The first time I did NaBloPoMo was 2011 and I wrote 13 posts. I didn't try in 2012, but made 30 in 2013. Last year I didn't participate either. For some reason it felt like I did more than that but really, folks, it looks like I've only completed NaBloPoMo once before this year. 

What I don't like about it is that some days the posts are not up to my standards. Some days I just dash off something to make deadline. I don't like doing work I can't be proud of. Thank you for reading the good and the bad.

As a thank you, I leave you with the opening for my current short story. It doesn't have a title yet.

On his twenty-second birthday, Julius Worthington III boarded a bus bound for a small, northwest Pennsylvania town, where he hoped the locals had short memories for newspaper headlines. At the Erie county courthouse an indifferent judge did a double-take at the name, peered at him for a short minute, then whisked through the rest of the hearing, after which Julius returned to Philadelphia as Julius Applebite. He had already settled upon Gordon, his mother's maiden name, until he passed a series of Burma Shave signs on U.S 6 and thought Applebite just sounded better. He would tell people it was Dutch.

On the trip home, Julius studied the map of Philadelphia's outlying areas. He didn't know where he wanted to go, exactly, so he started by calculating bike-able distance. But then he figured everything was a bike-able distance if you got an early start. Lots of little nowhere towns in New Jersey, he thought. Tomorrow he would ride.

Day 20: Comma, comma, comma, comma, comma chameleon.

I just started using an app called Grammarly, which monitors everything I type in this blog, on Facebook, in emails, and on message boards, and tells me what I'm doing wrong. I'm a terrible typist so it is forever flagging misspelled words, which are only misspelled because I've mistyped them, not because I'm a bad speller. My browser does have spellcheck for that so it's not, in and of itself, any more useful than spellcheck. But it also catches grammatical errors such as missing commas.

I'm a comma user. I've been accused of over-using them, and I have learned when I edit to cull them ruthlessly. Also, I like the Oxford comma and intend to use it as I see fit until I die because I'm a stickler for being correctly understood in written communications.

But Grammarly has been nagging me about OMITTING commas. Really? I under-use commas? Since when? Thing is, I don't always think Grammarly is correct. I wish I'd saved an example; so far it has not suggested a comma in this piece. (Please note the use of the semi-colon in the previous sentence, which many people feel is never necessary. I still love the semi-colon.)

So now I'm wondering who developed Grammarly's algorithm? Was it designed to give the most foolproof clarity in writing, or was it designed to work like a good human editor would work?

Either way, one thing is clear: I get sloppy in my online writing. Many of the suggestions are correct. I do sometimes omit commas. I've fallen victim to the deterioration of grammar skills we often blame on technology. I tell myself that if I was writing 'for real,' like a story or technical paper, I'd do better. But I want to write well everywhere. It's one of the things I like about myself.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

First, this post has been cooking for about a week but I have waited to go live until after NaBloPoMo. I didn't do NaBloPoMo this year because of stuff you will read about in a minute, and because I was busy re-doing the blog, but I was with the bloggers in spirit. I hope to join my brothers and sisters next year for all the blogapalooza fun.

Second, let me say Changes is for me only a medium-favorite Bowie song (though I really like the lines--And these children that you spit on / As they try to change their worlds / Are immune to you consultations / They're quite aware what they're going through), but I can't title this post Young Americans, after all. Or Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.

It's been a period of changes for me. As many of you know I tore my quadriceps tendon back in March. I had surgery, then spent most of the summer in various casts and splints and wheelchairs and walkers. And just when I was released to go back to work, my relationship with the Aurora Kennel ended. So now I'm working on strengthening my leg and searching for a job.

So what I've done is re-brand this blog. It is now called Time and Change, which are some of the words to the Ohio State Alma Mater, Carmen, Ohio. I kept most of the posts but deleted a few, and tidied up the junk. .

In the new blog I'm going to feature my writing a little more prominently, to which end I've also freshened up my web site.

And I'm going to try to use the blog to promote my real estate business, though not in an annoying way, I promise. For those who didn't know, I've been in real estate for several years, but I've kept it on the down-low to avoid any conflicts with my other job. But now I'm pulling off the cloak of invisibility; I'm ramping up my intensity.

[Quick Annoying Promotional Segment] If you know of anyone who is thinking about buying or selling a home, or is interested in investing in real estate, or is interested in a career in real estate, leave me a note in the comments and I'll contact you.

But this isn't going to be just a real estate and writing blog. It's going to be a music blog and an arts blog and a world blog and a blog that makes silly lists and shows you the picture of the elephant with his head stuck in a peanut butter jar as long as I can relate it back to something personal. In short I'm going to post the same wide range of things I've always done, trying to entertain and maybe make you think a little. If you have forgotten what those posts were like please take a few minutes to browse the blog archives, Personal favorites include How to Play the Cymbals, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, and Sometimes a Parade is Not Just a Parade.

And if you know of a job, let me know.


Thanks for reading---FJS