Starting over, again

What I'm getting myself into and my invitation to you

For a good long time, I’ve been blogging in one form or another.

It started when I had a temp job out of college and so much free time on my hands as the receptionist to two in-house lawyers that I decided it would be interesting to learn HTML. There was also a blogger blog for a while. Since 2017, I’ve done most of my writing at StoryCraft, my storytelling consulting business.

But I have a problem.

The problem is that I got annoyed by the idea that I had to always write about story. Story structure, story analysis, storytelling, and on and on and on. I stretched it at one point to include books and also some diversity material, but over time got lost in the feeling like I was cheating my own blog by writing about different topics. A story blog surely deserves some measure of fidelity and loyalty, but I also needed space to roam.

So, I did what all immature people do when they run into a problem. I retreated instead of trying to solve it. I haven’t blogged anywhere in a long time now and frankly, I miss it.

For a while, I’ve tossed around the idea of something new. Not for you because you have plenty of very interesting things you could read that are focused on tending to your interests and curiosities. Also, we’ve well proven that I am not good at the “write for your audience” thing. I’m too selfish and driven by my own curiosities. Sorry.

I want to write for me, to give myself permission to chase down all the weird and somehow disconnected interconnected things I think about during a day. The weird observations, the random connections, the endless curiosities. In short, this may be all because I cannot figure out where to talk publicly about the woman in my neighborhood who clears her sidewalk in the winter with a snowblower and wears a full length fur to do it.

So much to unpack there.

There are no promises to make here, no themes or questions. There’s seeking, asking, inquiring, wondering, really. Wondering what things are about, how they fit together, why they are the way they are and what it may (or may not) all have to do with life, the world, and even me.

You’ve made it this far, so let me tell you one last very important thing, perhaps the only important thing. I am absolutely addicted to responses to my reading. I know I’m not supposed to care, but the fact is that I look for traces of anyone having read my writing with same concentration I look for sand dollars on the beach. In fact, I’ve only once ever found a sand dollar on the beach, but let’s put that fact aside for a moment.

The point is to encourage you, dear reader, to comment, protest, complain, joke, respond in any way you feel compelled. When I was teaching, I would end classes by asking if anyone had any questions, comments, or jokes. Hereby, same.