My New Year's Resolution

I have always written. Even when I just shoved pages in a drawer and never let them see the light of day, I was writing. In the dark ages when I first started blogging (under another name on a now-defunct blogging network), I saw blogging as a more public form of writing practice. I saw it as a means to an end. Then I saw it as an end in itself. But now even that end seems. . .not what I want it to be.

I don't care if your blog is all reviews, or you just summarize what other people write (Hi, Huffington Post!) or if you exclusively write about your child's nap schedule. I don't care if you started blogging solely as a way to get free copies of crappy Christian novels. I don't care if you've always hated writing but started blogging anyway because it seemed a great way to sell your homemade candles. I really don't.

My blog, though, was supposed to be about the writing. And maybe a little extra income on the side. Okay, and those free circus tickets. But it was really supposed to help me write fiction and all the other forms I wanted to write. It was supposed to help me become a better writer. As well as keep me sane.

It totally worked on the sane thing.

But when I look at what my friend Travis has done with his blog, which I started reading in the second now-defunct internet writing community I was ever in, I feel disappointed in myself. As a side note, however, you should totally read his memoir The Feedstore Chronicles. Super, super, funny.

It's not that I don't have a book deal, or a few hundred thousand blog readers, it's that I've been so sidetracked. Mostly I've used this as a place to whine and vent. Sure, occasionally I was funny, but I didn't take time to turn those rants into something. The truth is, I've rarely edited any of my posts. Okay, that might not be news to you. But it's like I got so caught up in Twitter and Facebook and my own little world that I sort of forgot I was a writer first.

I squandered away all these opportunities I had to write for other websites because I just couldn't think of anything to say that would be easy to write and non-offensive and fit in with what I thought my "brand" should be and did I mention easy? Or I got too caught up in comparing myself to truly gifted bloggers and not wanting to even try to compete.  And that's what finally happened on my blog, too. I kept saying to myself, "You can't write about that - you're not an essayist. You can't write about that - this isn't a memoir. You can't write about that - the PTA moms might read it. You can't write about that - no one else is that obsessed with the Real Housewives. You can't write about that - it'll be too much work for the amount of time you have. You can't write that - someone else has already done it way better than you can." And so on.

Coincidentally, I've been a grouchy bitch for the last few months.

I keep thinking about Karly. She was one of the first mommy bloggers I read that I just totally loved. If you click the link, though, you will see this awesome food blog. Because she quit mommy blogging and became a food blogger.

Not that I'm going to become a food blogger. Unless you all want to learn about how I switched a pasta salad recipe around once and it wasn't a disaster. Yeah, so no, that's not going to work for me. I'm also not going to be a photography blogger, though I love how Lotus has meshed that into her blog. But, um, I'm kind of a lousy photographer.

I tried to be arty. Like the parking lot?

So I'm gonna write. And post it on the internet. Might be fragments of stories, might be memories, might be essays about The Real Housewives or how Newt Gingrich is a hypocrite, might be blogs about being a mommy. I'm going to edit things. I'm going to pretend I don't care what anyone thinks. I'm going to save my whining for Facebook and Twitter, where it belongs.

Thanks for sticking around. :)