Several weeks ago, I drove up to Baltimore with my boyfriend and attended a talk/book signing done by Stephanie PearlMcPhee. She talked about lots of different things including writing. Writers, she said, write. Novel concept, right? Everyday, she sets a goal for how much she has to write. It doesn't matter if she feels like writing or not. She's a writer. It's her job. A bus driver can't go to work and say, "I'm just not inspired to drive buses today!" and still remain a bus driver. She doesn't let herself off that easy either.
I liked the idea.
I like writing, but I wouldn't consider myself a writer. What if I could be one though? Where would that start? Setting a daily goal seemed like a good place. My goal is five hundred words. It's half a picture's worth of words and I think I can manage that even if I feel like I've got nothing to say. We'll see.
At the end of the last paragraph, I was only at one hundred, sixty-two words, so it could be harder than anticipated. These blog posts will most likely be written in the morning while drinking my coffee. My mind is still fuzzy and forming totally coherent thoughts may or may not be fully possible.
Normally, this time of day is spent surfing the internet, chatting with my boyfriend (he lives in England, we met online, we've both traveled across the ocean several times now visiting each other), and watching crap television on Hulu or Netflix while knitting. It's also generally spent thinking about how I should be tidying my room. I'm twenty-eight and still occasionally have piles of laundry on my bedroom floor that are only vaguely sorted into clean and dirty. I keep hoping I'll grow out of it, but it keeps not happening. I probably have to put a bit more effort into forming those sorts of habits.
It's only the first post and I'm realizing that five hundred words is a lot to come up with when I'm just typing whatever pops into my mind. It's good that I learned this lesson straight away. In the future, I'll come armed with defined topics. Maybe. Probably. There's still a possibility of mindless rambling.
This leaves me with the question of what on earth am I going to write about? I like knitting, but I'm not the sort of knitter who has eighteen projects going at once and I tend to be pretty slow and steady with the project or two I am working on. At the moment, it's a pair of socks for the boyfriend. I've made him one pair and he loves them, but wants some a little taller. I let him pick yarn out for the current pair and he picked some truly special self striping/patterning yarn by Regia. I'm doing toe-up, mostly stockinette stitch socks to get them as tall as possible and to get as much of the patterning effect as possible. I've been working on them for ages though and don't really know what I'll do next.
I could write about math. I teach it. I won't go into details about what sort of school I teach at or what age children I teach because I don't want to compromise my job or my students' privacy. I love both math and teaching it though. I'm not sure I have it in me to do a math blog though.
I could write about cooking. I love, love, love cooking. I'm not a master chef, but I can make some lovely fresh bread and last Sunday's dinner included some very nice homemade fried chicken that made my roommate think I'm a genius.
I've got loads of hobbies, but none of them are enough on their own to be a blog. Each of them individually are things I can get excited about though. Each of them on their own is something I should be able to come up with five hundred words about. I think I'll be able to make it work if I approach each day with a clear topic in mind. We'll see.
