I'm Hungry...

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

To Recover My Creativity

I want to write about the Cat Show at Madison Square Garden or the Economy or "Saturday Night Live," but I'm feeling too self-conscious.

Today, I decided to give myself the gift of focusing exclusively on my writing, rather than cramming it in around everything else I'm doing. That's turning out to be self-consciousness-producing.

Too bad. It's important to express myself, even if I'm listening too hard to each syllable as my fingertips slowly press it out.

Healthy Pressure

The artists support group I go to on Monday nights has agreed to devote on Monday a month to an Action Plan meeting.

That Monday is tomorrow night. Oy! The Plan will require each of us to declare and commit to what we'll do in a particular period of time to further our art. What I'd rather do today and forever is focus on petting the purring kitty, who's lying in my lap.

It's unnerving to try to figure out more than I'm doing via the blogging. In fact, my blog is far more than I ever did pre-blog to express my voice broadly. I started talking to one of my friends about the concept of the Action Plan and got the sense that committing further to my blog might not qualify as an OK Plan. It seemed that I needed to be paid for my writing, or at least published by someone else, rather than myself (via the blog).

What Would I Wish to Have Published?

That's the problem: I don't feel drawn to write anything that's commercially appealing. At dinner with a friend the other night, he said, "There's definitely a market for memoirs, but they have to be ironic, like David Sedaris' or Augusten Burrough's, and you probably don't want to write like that."

~Giant sneeze and Phoebe, the kitty, claws through my sweatpants as she springs off my lap in fear.~

In 2000, I completed a 180-page, coming-of-age memoir, but have had no desire to continue revising and editing it to make it commercially viable. The blog appeals to me so much because the only sort of writing that interests me in my free-time features my reflections on what I hear and see and experience around me.

If someone were willing to publish the best of my blog entries as a book, that would be wonderful. I just want the writing to be pure pleasure, and not laborious. Chutpah, I know.

Phoebe is back.