I use the word “I” about a hundred and fifty times in this essay, and I apologize for that right now . 

About 20 years ago I bought a dollhouse kit and spent two years making it.  I worked on it at a dollhouse store that included a workspace where I rented a table.  There were others there as well and it was a great place for me to get away from it all and get some alone time while I was raising the boys.  My table looked out over the water in Benicia, California, and I was soothed by the many moods of the water and setting sun, driving rain on the water, or the advancing fog.  I remember at the time finding out that there was a whole world that I didn’t know existed – the world of miniatures.  I felt like Alice down the rabbit hole. I could make my own miniature fruit, furniture, floors, toilet paper rolls, you name it.  I could buy (well, no I couldn’t) miniature crystal chandeliers worth $1000.00.  If it exists in the world it can be made or someone else has made it.  I could recreate the desk I’m typing at right now, down to the smallest detail.   The dollhouse is gone now but I plan to make roomboxes to hold the furniture I collected over the years.   It’s been calling to me and compete with all the other stuff that calls me – ultimately I’m like a little girl who just wants to play all day.

I mention it because I am finding out the same thing about the world of writing.  This little blog is solely for the purpose of disciplining myself to write about something, anything, every day.  Obviously I took a little time off when I was in Illinois, and it is difficult to get back into it, which proves that I need to do it.  Mostly I noticed a dearth of subject matter rolling around my noggin since returning and I am afraid that I am going to cover ground I’ve already covered.  I want to get all this stuff printed out in case some cyber disaster causes everything I’ve written to be deleted and hopefully I will remember what I’ve written so you don’t have to read it a second time.  Oh man, I hate to even think of that, really, and I will get to the printing soon. 

I have subscribed to a magazine entitled Poets and Writers and boy oh boy, what a fascinating magazine it is – a whole new world I didn’t know existed.  I still have no goals, and want to keep it that way – I just want to play.  To get too serious just seems like it would take all the fun and joy out of it.  I have my day job, I’m going to try to write and administrate more in that setting and in the professional association as a volunteer, and I want to learn more about the craft of writing.  I want to take a course here, a course there, and just slowly learn more and more and maybe delight other humans along the way with my writing.  That will be enough. 

The magazine I speak of is pretty cool, though.  In the back there are classifieds – did you know there is a magazine that is put out by a medical center back East that solicits articles by people about health care?  Tempting.  In the front there are articles about writing and writers that are so much fun to read as I discover my feelings about writing, both good and bad, are hopelessly universal and normal.  What I like most of all, is that unlike walking into a bookstore and thinking “My God, there are so many books, who needs one more?  Why would anyone want to write?” I end up thinking “What the hell, might as well write, everyone else seems to be having fun doing it.” 

My friend Terri got me started watching Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)  on TED and although  I haven’t finished watching it, she started out by saying something to the effect that there is a common idea that successful artists have to be crazy, depressed, eccentric or one bad night away from cutting off an ear and sending it to a lover. Then she asked, in earnest,  if the audience  was really ok with that!  I suspect the rest of the speech puts that notion to rest, and the more I get into the world of writing the more I see that although certainly some great writers are whackos or socially aberrant, it may not be a requirement for the run of the mill writer to be a tortured soul.  This is good news indeed!  Perhaps my smile, which I’ve heard over the years is one of my finest features, can inform my writing in ways that will make my times of depression cower in fear.  Now that would be something to write about!