To blog or not to blog?

posted in: Blog | 1
I have the desire. Who doesn’t? I want to talk about all of the things I go through. In minute detail. But I’m not sure I want to talk to everyone in the world. Or everyone in the world with internet access. Who am I kidding? To the few people that stumble across this site. The problem is anonymity. Not knowing them. Or worse, what if you’re someone I know? In full disclosure, the desire to create a blog isn’t new. Several months ago I started this blog (see my drawing of a bell pepper, posted in January 2010). I spent a full day setting up the wordpress site, selecting a template (talk about hard choices!), customizing the header, redirecting the site to my custom url, and posting the drawing of a bell pepper. And that was it. I let the site languish for half a year. Turns out, I had no desire to post my random thoughts to the world. Instead, several months later I decided to build an entire website from scratch. Forget a blog, I want a website! Except… the desire to blog has resurfaced. The first thing I (kind of desperately) wanted to blog about was this book I’m writing. The process has been challenging, infuriating, daunting, and fascinating (to me), and what I want to do pretty much 100% of the time is tell anyone who will listen what I’m going through. So, I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to blog about my draft novel-in-progress? Well, it took about half a second to realize, nope, that would probably suck. First, I’d likely spend more time blogging about the book than writing it. And there are a million wise sages who advise writers NOT to talk about a work in progress. I’ve already trampled over that advice by talking about it to a few people who are close to me, and by sharing early chapters with my writing group, which has been pretty invaluable. But blogging is not the right forum. Then it hit me—why not blog about building my website? It’s both a creative and technical process. And get this, the website is about creativity. Not only that, but I'd love to find a way to show works of art in progress, to dive into how art is created, not to be instructional, but to simply show the process as it unfolds. So, to that end, this blog is about process, my process, as someone who has some professional experience creating websites, but no direct knowledge of html or CSS or how to build one myself. I'm learning as I go, and will document the journey (and probably a few random thoughts on creativity or life in general) here.

One Response

  1. I like the last few paragraphs – you sound like you’ve found your focus, and I look forward to reading more.

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