My first online presence was my own website, way back in the ’90’s hosted by SDinternet.
My first online writing, however, was at OpenDiary (which is now closed). It predates LiveJournal, and while I played in LJ’s sandbox for a while, I prefer my own space, the ability to write short pieces or long pieces as the mood strikes, and the lack of high-schoolish drama.
For the longest time, everything I posted was essay-length, and now I’m much more likely to do short bits. For the first several years, I posted daily. Now, while I still write daily, it’s usually not stuff I post, but sections of longer pieces I’m working on offline.
I go months without posting here, often without realizing just how long it has been.
A few days ago, I found a site with a suggested list of 47 words (47 because they included Sundays and didn’t end on Maundy Thursday) to be used as inspiration for a Lent project. It asked for people to share pictures that embody the daily word, but I prefer words to photographs most of the time, and as I don’t really belong to the church that suggested the project, I feel funny about participating directly.
Still, I seem to like having some degree of external accountability, even if it’s only committing to a project only I know about.
Today’s word is “practice.”
When I was doing music every day, I didn’t like practicing very much, just like I never liked doing homework, but at least now I recognize the value in the former. (I still don’t see the point of homework.)
This blog, however, was created, in part, to be my writing practice. As I’ve explained more than once, I don’t keep paper journals. I don’t see the point in writing things no one will read. (I do have stacks of notebooks, but they’re filled with fragments of stories, and will eventually get used.)
I’m not promising to be a slave to this Lenten project, but I don’t think it would hurt me to return to a practice of daily blogging.
Maybe it will even help me – I’m between projects, and am always happier and more productive when I have lots of different things going on.
Photo Credit: alenavlad @ 123RF.com
My mother says I always practiced the piano without her having to tell me, but there is a fundamental difference between sitting down to play the piano – which I did all the time! – and actually practicing. It’s the same with writing, especially on blogs. Sometimes I think my blog writing is like all that piano “playing” I did. I’d sit down, play through all my favorite songs, sight read some new stuff…but when I hit a rough patch in the music, likely as not I’d quit or skip over it. Writing a blog post is pretty easy. Although I spell check and grammar check and do some editing, most of it is straight off the top of my head.
Writing for REAL? That takes practice – warming up with scales and exercises, going over and over a passage until it’s perfect, taking the lines apart bit by bit, analyzing the phrasing for proper emphasis of the melodic line,
Sorry to write you a mini-essay – but as usual, you’ve made me feel are “writerly”;)