first kiss

This first blog will probably be a little like a first kiss: exciting, uncomfortable, embarrassing in retrospect but something that will only improve with practise.

I took the leap (or leaned in unexpectedly - to make this an extended metaphor) because my writing is something I wish to take both more and less seriously fom now on. I need to take it more seriously and become disciplined about practising. I need to take it less seriously and play more. I must stop feeling like writing is a gargantuan task reserved only for geniuses who are way crazier and therefore more brilliant than me. I too have stories that need to be told and consumed or savoured or tossed aside. In any case, they need to come into being and become handled and touched and felt. Stories that are half-formed in my own brain will be lost and my own contribution to people's knowledge of the human condition will go to waste.

Dante created a special place in hell for those who let life pass them by. It was a dreadful, empty wasteland of nothingness and in-between. I don't translate myself and my keyboard into an image of a knight with a sword on a quest (Monty Python already ripped that image to shreds and it's too phallic for me anyway) but I do imagine myself walking through a landscape and leaving marks of passage behind. Some people will see them, others won't, and eventually it will be erased by other markings or it will simply be overgrown. At least I walked through the landscape, I didn't remain in the house waiting for my place in the wasteland one day.

Ah, so many mixed metaphors. But i think I'm going to enjoy this blog thing.