And This Is For? The subject, in a couple of different ways has come up a couple of different times recently of what it takes to be a "popular" on-line journaler. A coherent life narrative, it seems, is where it's at in the realm of attracting eyeballs and keeping the people coming back for more. People want a peek into the lives of others, a virtual sneaking into somebody else's room and looking through a real live diary. An investment in a life other than their own, and that makes sense, and, you know, whatever. Except not. When I started this thing I really wasn't looking to get any kind of mass audience. I just figured telling a few friends and leaching off a well placed link offered to me would be just the thing I needed to activate my overdeveloped sense of obligation and keep me writing. Because writing, it sucks. Writing is about as isolated and alone as one is likely to get. There is no audience to cheer or boo, to laugh or cry. No director telling you that you couldn't emote your way through a lunch order at Burger King. It's just you and computer/typewriter/notepad, looking blankly at blankness before tentatively getting some words out then deciding that those words suck and trying some new ones that maybe don't suck so much. Eventually you hope that you find the least awful combination of words. It's like playing Wheel Of Fortune, only the losers get taken off to the dark corners of the stage and locked in a closet with "ignominy" scrawled across the door in crayon and the winner gets punched in the stomach. I am lucky enough to have a great many friends who are, so to speak, artistically inclined. Painters, musicians, photographers, designers, and writers. All of them are deeply talented and much more serious about what they do that I have ever been. Many of them churn with their own forms of doubt and self-loathing, but in the end they are not hobbyists tooling around with their little projects. I, on the other hand, very much am. Sure, I've been doing this for a couple of years now, and yeah, every now and then I find the luck to scrape together something that can pass as good, but in the works of others it is obvious that such is not the case. I guess that sounds somewhat depressing, but the reality is that anybody who creates does so in an attempt to communicate/say something important/simply entertain and for some, that is done not just because that is what they do but because that is who they are. I like to entertain, and sometimes I even have something to say, but this is not who I am. Well-Not with this kind grammar anyway.
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