Writing

In keeping with my suggestions for what to do at this time of the year when summer is ending and fall is beginning, I am writing my blog at 12:11 AM when I am very sleepy and really want to get some of that time-wasting sleep I wrote about in one of those first posts.

"Who are you writing to?" is a question I have asked myself since I typed the period after the last word on my first post and then clicked on "Publish Post" and am still unable to answer. According to good writing, I should follow this sentence with another, clarifying sentence, but nothing comes to mind so I'll move on to

I kept journals for thirty years and I never wrote anything funny. Rereading those journals was always a drag because they consisted of accounts of years of nonstop suffering from heartache, premenstrual syndrome, malice, betrayals, recurring dreams, marriage, divorce, the burglary and two subsequent break-in attempts in the same month by three different people of a nasty little apartment I had just moved into in Long Beach, menopausal symptoms, insomnia, parental dementia, and an awful lot of other stuff.

However, when I wrote letters about these things, and then time went by and the letters became emails, my friends would tell me how they laughed and laughed at my "adventures."

"You should write a book," they would tell me. But I never wanted to write a book. I just wanted to write letters or emails.

I did try to write, and by that I mean fiction. I worked long and hard in short story classes and I always liked what I wrote but no one else did. I couldn't understand where I was going wrong because I wrote fiction the way I wrote letters and everyone liked them. It took me fifteen years to realize that fiction isn't supposed to be written that way and that I'm incapable of writing fiction that doesn't annoy readers.

This blog feels as good to write as a letter or an email. I like the way my words look in this Georgia typeface, I like the way they look on the published page. I don't know who reads what I write and I don't know who doesn't. I don't know how to set up things so I can get responses from readers and that's how I like it. There's a lot to like about writing this blog and I still don't know who I'm writing to.