Sunday, March 23, 2014

This is not a blog, because I don't even write much.

This is really, really not my scene. When I write, I do it on paper (the stuff made of trees, not the app), and I can't say anything more significant than what you'd put on a Post-It at work unless I use a medium-point purple Flexgrip or a pencil (not the kind you click, but a proper Ticonderoga that you have to sharpen after every page).
I have an iPad Mini so I can draw badly, play word games, take decent pictures, and find out who That Chick in That Movie is and why I recognize her (Jena Malone, because of Stepmom and Donnie Darko), but I don't own a computer and haven't in three years or so. My phone isn't even smart.
So it's unlikely at best that I'd start another blog, let alone buy two domains, but I did just that this past weekend.
I really, really want to blame my sister, the writer who actually writes, but if I want to do that, I have to blame 23-year old me first.
My sister was just north of 30 when she had her daughter, and so,e months later, she announced that she'd never write again. That part of her life was over. She was a Mother, not  a creative conduit. Now, I was very good at being 23, even better than I was at being 22.  A kind of What's My Age Again, quintessentially 90s slacker-rock girl.
Slacking did not, however, apply to my creativity. At one point, I decided eating and sleeping were interfering with my ability to fill two or three notebooks a month and cut back extensively on both. So not surprisingly, the idea that the big sister I'd trailed after mimicking every move was "done" writing was not acceptable. My friend Jeff and I had just started an informal writers' group, so I insisted she attend. Somewhere along the way, she actually started writing again. Then she stopped showing up, stalked Rick Springfield (in a very professional manner, though), wrote a fairly successful biography of him, became a stringer for our  local newspaper (teaching a lawyer the inverted pyramid in under 30 minutes is not challenging, in case it ever comes up), wrote more stuff, and kept getting paid to sit around in her pajamas writing things.
In the meantime, I went back to school, the 90s ended, I became unnervingly likely to succeed, worked for and learned from one of my all-time favorite writers (Laurence Gonzales--if you missed him, you missed a lot), watched the Clintons leave office and my friends start pairing off and mating, and finally sank into a no chance of living up to everyone's expectations/best years of my life are over depression.
A lot more stuff happened in between, but not all of it is worth mentioning. The car fire is, but that's another story, one that didn't happen on 294, though it was a Chicago area car fire.
So now I have some domains. I wonder what I'm supposed to do with them. Pending a clue, I think I will go knit another hat.

2 comments:

  1. That wasn't new, you know--with the exception of 273 pages of a novel that I cranked out in three weeks in 1993, I hadn't written in about seven years when Tori was born.

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    1. If you, dear and constant reader when there's something to read, haven't figured out that I have a very poetically-licensed memory by now, I worry.
      Reality check appreciated.

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