On the blog, part 1

It's the week of my "Blog-o-versary," and I've got blogging on my mind. Okay, I've frequently got blogging on my mind anyway. Just ask my family. Ada routinely points out when something would be "good on the blog." And now I have people actually asking when I'm going to post, which I find oddly thrilling--as though someone has ordered a subscription to my "magazine."

Except this isn't a magazine. Or a diary. Or a gallery. Or a conventional conversation. Or an essay. I would like it to be all of those things, and it has shadows of each playing behind it.

What is this blog, anyway, and why am I so heady for writing it?

The first thing I can say for sure about it is that I am writing almost every day now, and that is the biggest boon of this blog. There were many periods of my life in which I wrote on a daily basis: As an undergraduate, I majored in English (quelle surprise!) and wrote papers constantly. For various other jobs I've had: I wrote ad copy for a publishing copy, and promotional materials and procedure for a university, and a human resources manual for a private company. In graduate school, I wrote countless papers on rhetoric, composition, education, and all sorts of topics related to these. And I started writing poetry. In earnest.
In between these times, I've written overly long letters to friends and intimidated them unintentionally by the length of my notes--a few people been apologetic that they can't write back at such length.
Even when I was teaching English, I wrote the assignments with my students--that is to say, I assigned myself the task of writing the same topics the students did--a very worthwhile exercise for determining if an assignment "worked" or "flopped." In the same vein, I wrote daily "feedback" for myself to recap the day's discussions, and to figure out if I was taking the class in the right direction. I also wrote massive letters of feedback for each student, and my assignments were written with the detail of a novella (quelle surprise, you say).

During that time, we also started the process for adoption Ada, and as part of it, I was asked to write a brief history of myself. You can imagine how shocked the social worker was to receive my 26-page, single-spaced piece. Brief it was not, but important for me to write, yes. And important that Ada have it one day for herself, to see me at that moment, on the brink of parenthood. The real audience for that history, as I pointed out to the social worker, was me. And future Ada.

I am verbose.

But for a few years, I was silent, at least in writing. My letters dwindled to postcards, my poems dried up. My essays and pontifications in writings....gone.


Some of my energy went to making art--sewing, painting, etc--but much of it went to folding clothes, cleaning bathrooms, morning sickness, and just life. I wasn't able to blend the writing and the doing.

Enter the blog.


As you know from this post alone, I continue to pour my heart out. From a rhetorical perspective, the blog is a perfect space for this type of writing. My friend La Belette Rouge wrote an amazing post today on writing her way through something without knowing her destination, and that is what my blog posts are so much of the time: writing through and creating a space.

Having a blog has allowed me to literally create a space (with images, spacing, color, photos, etc) in which I can pour my heart out and find out where I am in the world. In that regard, it's like a diary. But because of the audience of you, dear reader who has made it through this meandering, this writing has more of a shape. It is shaped like the space between me and you.


I am a generous and more selfless in real life. But on paper, I am a selfish writer, going on and on. I have never meant to intimidate with the length of the letters or the posts I write. I write and write to capture the play of words that run through my mind all the time, like insects beating against the night window. Like a lepidopterist, I pin the thoughts to the wall of the blog and examine them to see if they are light and lovely like butterflies or dark and insidious like moths. They are, invariably, both. And some fly away. And as with all collectors, it is really only me who is most pleased by my collection of words... I look back at what I've captured and I see myself.


If you have made it this far through this post, I thank you for sharing this odd and sometimes disturbing or tiresome collection. ...

How do you do it?

Over the holidays, in conversations with friends and family, I've wandered into the topic of blogging several times.   It's not something I always confess to doing.  I say confess, because talking about it does feel like a confession of sorts--to see my blog is to see a side of me that's not immediately apparent in my day-to-day life.   

Slowly, though, I am revealing it to people in my real life. See the pretty cards MOO cards I made for calling cards? I've now included the URL to 3littlechickies, which is a big step.

My blog takes up a decent amount of my thinking time, and writing it is something I really love to do. After keeping my blog for almost two years, I'm more ready to talk about it in real life. Maybe I'm getting more comfortable with the merge between the me I present in writing and the me in person. That's not to say that I'm so very different; it's just that to look at me, you really wouldn't think that I had much to say.   That assumes that I do have something to say, and that's assuming that the way a person looks is always representative of what they think about--oh boy, this is getting complicated, and this is why I don't usually talk about it.    That is fodder for an entirely different post, isn't it?

What I'm talking about here is much simpler.  How do I go about blogging?   Here are a few of the questions I get.  I'll give a few answers here, answers that are attempts to be more articulate than my off-the-cuff responses I've given to family or friends in the past.

Question 1:

"No, really," I'm asked by a family member, "how do you find the time?  I don't know where you find the time to write anything, let alone take photos."

It's not surprising I get asked this. I make no secret about not having time to do the basic things, like finish folding the laundry, or vacuuming the carpets more than once or (if I'm really good!) twice a week.  So to do the blog, I don't find time to write. I sneak it or steal it.  For instance, this entry that you're now reading has taken me 9 visits to the computer, each fewer than 4 minutes long. Some of my visits are less than a minute long, actually. Before I'm ready to hit the publish button, I imagine I will have written for a total of 35 minutes or more, and then edited for 10. And all of this writing is literally done in bits and pieces, a sentence or two at a time, in the bits of time I can manage to carve out of the day.  The time deficit from all these stolen moments shows itself in piles of socks that need to be folded, and sometimes by the circles under my eyes from waking up too early.

Question 2:
"Where do you get ideas? I would have no idea what to write."

I have always loved writing, and in my head, I'm "writing" all the time. So coming up with ideas and developing them has never been a problem. These writing-thoughts are the basic starting ideas for the posts, and they come to me all the time. I put some of them into a little notebook, and some of them get axed by my "inner editor" to be fodder for something else, like an essay or a poem. My family is sweetly supportive of my blogging, too, so sometimes my topics come from them. For instance, Ada will give me a suggestion, like "Hey mom, this soup is so good, it should go on your blog! Go get your camera!" A cute endorsement like that will sometimes make me write a post immediately.

Question 3:
"Who are you writing this for?"
This is the biggest and most loaded question of all, and it's one I grapple with all the time. In fact, getting asked this question is probably why I haven't talked about the blog as much as I might have. It merits a few posts for a fully-developed answer, but I'll give the brief version here.

Coming from some relatives, asking "Who are you writing for?" is akin to asking "Is a blog like email?" Needless to say, this relative isn't going to be looking at my blog anytime soon. Neither is the person who is asking it with an inflection that says, "Who do you think you are? Why are you wasting your time with this?" These people aren't my audience.

But you are reading this, aren't you? I am writing for you. I am writing for myself, too. I'm writing for people who know me well in person and live far away, and I'm writing for people who haven't met me, but know me through my words. I'm writing it because I feel compelled to get some of my thought-writing into a space other than the one between my ears. I send this little snippet of myself into the ethers and hope to make a connection with someone else, even if it's only connecting with the me I'll be at some later date...