I passed the one year anniversary of Thoughts in Random Patterns about ten days ago. I wrote my first blog post on Saturday, June 19, 2004, and then did what apparently a lot of bloggers do: I didn’t write another post until Monday, January 3, 2005. Then I only did one post in February. It has taken me awhile to build momentum, but I’m in the groove now and definitely intend to keep communicating this way. Going to Paris steadied my blogging practice, both because it was an easy way to communicate to friends and family what I was doing, and because I felt like life in Paris was "worthy" of writing about. It’s so hard to realize that all of our daily lives are "worthy" of writing about. I wanted to share my experience of that great city, and writing helps me synthesize my own thoughts, too.
Part of the long blogging hiatus last summer and fall was that after my initial post I had a couple of frustrating experiences with blogging and got discouraged. Just a couple of days after my first post I crafted a long essay about something and posted it as a draft. When I went back to do some editing, the post was gone. That was frustrating. Typepad has improved significantly in the past 6 months, but I still use a blog posting tool called BlogJet that allows me to create posts without needing to be connected to the internet and has a spell-checker and lots of editing options and saves files to my local hard drive. Formatting still has challenges. I changed from a 2 column layout to a 3 column layout after I got back from France and all the pretty pictures that I had incorporated into text got squished instead of magically resizing to fit into the new column size. I’m sure the blog magicians will figure all of that out, too — and the technology is at a point where I feel fairly confident that my labors won’t be lost.
Two friends whose blogs inspired me to get going aren’t blogging anymore. Jerry actually closed his blog down, and Jenny just doesn’t write much anymore. I keep them on my Blogroll as an optimistic gesture that there may come a time that blogging works better for them than it does now. The ocean of language always awaits us.
And part of the long dry spell was that I didn’t write at all last summer, and didn’t write much last fall, and haven’t been doing much writing work in the last year at all. I still haven’t come to a place in my writing life where I’ll say no to six weeks in Paris to stay home and work. I am committed to working on my writing this summer. I have a two month window of time here with only the occasional interruption (e.g., a trip to Japan at the end of July). I printed out the current draft version of The North Side of Trees and am going to start working my way through what I’ve already written and see what remains to be done. I’ll have my very own writing desk and music and candles and no excuses.
Every day you must say to yourself, “Today I am going to begin.”
(Jean Pierre de Caussade SJ)
Thoughts In Random Patterns 