A small epiphany about this blog

I want to talk a bit about this blog and a small but obvious epiphany I had.

So, the thing is, I want to write stories.  I have wanted to since I was a little girl.  I've had stories and pieces of stories rattling around in my head since the 1990s.  I have incomplete pieces written on scraps of digital files throughout multiple folders, drives, and even old disks that used a technology I may not be able to access (but I digress)...

Life has taken me on many various adventures and into so many various nooks and crannies of the Earth and the universe that I will not attempt to take this up here and now.  Suffice it to say that writing has been a challenge.  Not just having the time, but getting into the right (pun!) mindset and into what people sometimes call the "creative flow" (trite, I know.)  It seems that I am always between one emergency and the next, one time sensitive or pressing/stressful matter and the next.  And when I finally do have some time in which I could (theoretically) write, my mind becomes a tired blank.

In any book one comes across about how to learn to write and become a good writer, it is stressed that writers write.  Yes, they write.  And they write a lot.  Read a lot, write a lot.  Yep.  Got it.  Check.

There was a time in my early years when I did that.  Life hasn't been like that for a long time though.  I wake up to an email inbox full of things to do and I tend to dive right in.  And have a hard time not doing so.  A year or two ago I decided I wanted to tackle this.  I bought books about writing.  I tried to develop writing habits.  Like "wake up in the morning and write something, anything, for five minutes."  Sounds easy but, nope.  It doesn't happen.  I don't do it. I don't want to do it.  It doesn't get done.

It's like what they say about exercise.  The best exercise is the one you actually do, right?

Now, there is a second issue relevant to the matter at hand here.  And that is the subject of blogging.  

Many years ago, in 2006, I first became acquainted with the subject of internet marketing.  Shortly thereafter, I became acquainted with the subject of blogging.

I began blogging.  I did, in fact, become successful at making a few hundred dollars a month in ad revenue from a few blogs, even though I only had a few hours a week to work on it.

It was not long, however, that I began down the long and treacherous tortuous road of every-thing-but-writing.

Offsite SEO. Onsite SEO.  Commenting.  Backlinks.  Themes. Widgets.  Templates.  Wordpress.  Joomla.  More widgets.  Footers. Fussing around with footers and widgets and design and ... reading about blogging.  Exports, imports, redirects, offsite article marketing, multiple blogs, multiple websites to manage, updates, affiliate links, legal pages, updates, backups, HTML, PHP, and eventually, hiring someone else to write for me.  I was soon overwhelmed and dispersed.  I wound up getting quite good at putting websites together.  I began to take on a few freelance clients.  Eventually I founded and ran a successful web development company which lived for over a decade, paid our bills, and gave us the freedom we needed to build up to the next plateau of our lives.  So, no, it was not all for naught. I learned a lot.  I used what I learned.  But it wasn't writing.  Not anymore.

Sometimes I look back wistfully and wish I had just stuck to writing (or at least, mostly writing) and built up a proper blog filled with ... content.  Real content.  From me. 

I did, to a degree, on various and sundry blogs, which I eventually backed up somewhere and took offline.  But there were just too many distractions from writing.

Secretly, I'd still love to have a blog.  A real blog.  Albeit an anonymous blog.  Like this one.

I like the idea of sowing little seeds into the vast fields of the internet every once in a while, and seeing if they grow, and seeing if they ever become something that I could use for greater purposes ... like, making more money, to be honest.  Even if it is money for humanitarian causes, it is money.

I also need a better way to write every day.  I need to practice writing if I am ever going to get anywhere with my stories.  Any writing will do, but I really must write every day.  Anything, on any subject, that is fine.  But I must find a better way to keep writing.

It occurred to me that I could kill two birds with one stone.  Practice writing. Build a blog.

What's nice about this approach is that I don't really worry about rambling, or about the quality of my writing, or about whether I chose the exact right words to craft the perfect sentence that no one may ever read.  Because, let's face it, I'm shouting out into a void ... a vast, wide, happy void that may or may not ever hear me.  And this lets me relax, and write, and write.  It lets me practice.  But it's not quite the same as simply writing onto a Notepad file on my computer (that is really audience-less).  When I write on a blog, there is always some possibility that my words may one day, no matter how far in the future, have a reader.  This lets me feel like I am communicating to someone, potentially, without the pressure of knowing with certainty that I am.  It may sound convoluted, but to me, it's not.

This is what I will do.