A Blog?

     When I was little, I enjoyed writing.  My mom read to me constantly, I started reading pretty young and I had Calvin and Hobbes to thank for a pretty damn broad vocabulary at a pretty damn young age.  I was always pretty literate and had a pretty bizarre imagination so I'd draw cartoons and write and things like that.  I was particularly good at diagramming sentences, a skill that was apparently growing pretty unpopular among grammar school English teachers at the time but which mine swore by.  I liked seeing how everything fit together, the construction, and how very technical (without stating it explicitly) language could be.

Also, I enjoyed adding borders and turning the intricate lines (drawn precisely and with a ruler, of course) into aircraft carriers and space fighters (no rulers in sight).

But I really enjoyed writing.  It was something I and everyone around me kind of figured I'd wind up doing for a living.  My mom always said she saw me becoming Sam Seaborn, Rob Lowe's character from The West Wing.  I would've been okay with that, I liked Sam.

Then I got to high school, and stopped.  I didn't stop thinking I'd be a writer, I stopped writing.  I was busy with school and stuff, sure, but I kept putting it off.  I didn't like the idea of other people seeing my writing, and I figured I could keep it up without doing it so frequently.  That dragged on into college, although where I went to college there REALLY wasn't any time for that.  Although a few of my friends managed to write casually.

As a side note, I'm referring to fiction writing.  My major in college, and so many of my high school classes, required me to do plenty of research writing and stuff like that.  Although now that I've been out of college for longer than I was in it (good God, I'm getting old) I still feel confident that I could bang out a research paper.

But I took a creative writing class in my junior year (although we didn't call it that...okay, I went to a service academy, now you know).  After having not done any real writing in close to seven years...the results were atrocious.  I mean, we were required to basically write two short stories over the course of the semester with other random exercises thrown in, and mine were simply atrocious.  I couldn't think of anything to write, couldn't come up with an ending to anything I DID write.  It was eye opening, and I resolved to try and recover what I had lost, what I had let atrophy...willingly.

That was now, once again, seven years ago. Since then, I signed up for NaNoWriMo three years in a row and wrote...not a single goddamn word.

So that's what I'm doing here.  I will start writing.  About any goddamn thing, it doesn't matter.  I just want to write again, I want to start somewhere, I will start here.  Read it, or don't, or read some of it.  Or don't.