And We're Back

You know you've fallen out of touch when the Flickr pictures of the new baby are the first you've heard that your friends are expecting.

I started this blog some time ago. I wasn't very good at keeping it. I had just quit the sensible job with the good salary, and I had all these plans. Plans of wacky adventures that would serve as a backdrop for the process of reawakening my creativity. Eventually, once said creativity had heard the alarm and had some coffee, I might come up with a novel or something. Keeping a public blog would be a great way to motivate myself, I thought. Once I got used to writing in the public eye, I wouldn't be so critical and delete-happy with my fiction attempts.

The trouble is, my plans for wacky adventures leading to a charmed life was a better plot than anything I've ever come up with for fiction. I've really enjoyed my life since I left the programming world, but life goes off-plot more than Tolkien. It didn't fit with what I had planned for my blog, so I just didn't write at all.

I was reminded of my poor, neglected blog when my friend Fee decided to start a blog to go along with her renewed dedication to painting: Works in Progress. And so, I've decided to give my own blog another shot. I've already taken the logical first step to restarting my blog: I deleted all the posts.

I spent almost a week trying to come up with a post about how I haven't written. I couldn't find a way to make it anything but a bunch of petty excuses. Finally, it occurred to me that I had failed the first time because the blog was simply a reason to write. It was lacking a theme. A theme is a much more compelling reason to write than writing simply as an exercise. I had shied away from one the first time because I didn't want to pretend I was some sort of expert on any given subject. Of course, there is a subject I know everything about. I know all about not writing!

And voila, we have a theme.