Let me start out by saying, I blogged, but I didn't enjoy it. Okay, I enjoyed it a little, only because I love to tell a story. "What happened was..." comes out of my mouth at least once a week, often more. I'm a serial storyteller. I tell a story at least once a day, mostly to the kids. Sometimes I pick a new victim, it depends on how many days I've been holed up with my keyboard as my primary conversationalist.
I decided to test myself, my writer self. Sure, I could write a book, get great reviews, and fans asking for the next in the series, but I was more than that. I hoped. I love to tell a story, a blog is a type of story, and authors are expected to blog, so I would blog.
I picked a launch day and start blogging. Every. Day.
By the end of the week, I was bored. A couple of months in I dreaded my daily chore. I kept blogging, erratically, with little rhyme or reason to my posts. Still buying into the idea that as a writer, blogging is in my blood, I decided the problem was structure. I didn't have any. So, I signed up as a freelance blogger, landing a mommy blog.
I would blog for them at least a year, I decided. A really long year. I learned a lot. Mostly, that I don't love writing mommy blogs, which I already should have suspected since I don't love reading them either.
Since then, I've blogged and written, for many different entities, enhancing my skills and making me think about the writer I am and the one I want to be. Mostly, I've learned that being a writer, of anything, doesn't automatically mean you love or hate any particular kind of writing. That's the joy of it. It takes all kinds of kinds to manipulate these twenty six letters into something worth reading.
All of this, to tell you my dirty little writer secret. I dislike blogging, intensely, except when I don't. I don't even like reading them, except when I do. As a painter friend of mine once said, "I hate it. But, I must do it. I am compelled, except when I'm not."
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