Why my blog posts are few and far between
You may have noticed I don’t blog as often as somebody doing good author-blogger-speaker promo is supposed to. I blog with an irregularity that often makes me cringe before my social-media guru husband.
I could give you a sob story of the reason you’d expect—life is so dang busy. I’ve got two kids, a PhD program, a husband working full time, speaking engagements, church involvement, four chickens, a rabbit, a fish, and a a huge commercial garden in our yard (which I don’t run, thankfully).
Instead I’d rather talk to you about the better reason.
I love words.
I love the power of crafted, thoughtful, dare I say inspired words.
I have come to be honest with myself. Those kind of words don’t promise to show up at my fingertips whenever I want them.
I am a full devotee of the concept of a Muse.
Back a couple centuries, writers used to think it was smooth to start out their big important writing by invoking the Muse, thanking their Muse, admitting they’d be nothing without the Muse. Correct me if I’m wrong (those of you who have studied literature more recently than my 13-year-ago degree in English lit), but I think good old blind John Milton actually invoked a Muse before he wrote Paradise Lost, the big fat Christian poem he supposedly wrote in one long sitting by the miraculous power of God. His Muse is not just from some Greco-Roman mythological deity, it’s a Christianized way of talking about how dang hard it is to write.
Those writers got it right: writing isn’t something that we have any right to claim to do well by our own power. It’s sucky hard. It always seems so ludicrously unlikely that I should ever have anything to say worth sharing on the WorldWideMonstrosity.
If I do stumble on something you needed to read today, it is most definitely through a supernatural power. The fundamentalists would make me call it the power of Jesus. I prefer to envision that power like an elegant lady in an emerald green gown who floats into my bedroom on occasion to sing a haunting tune that gets me out of bed to go take dictation to her spoken word art.
I’m not saying I sit around and don’t do anything with words until the green lady shows up. I am about the most regimented student/writer you’ll ever meet. From the moment my kids leave school until the moment they return home, I am at my computer or with book in hand or on a bus or in a classroom getting article-reading and paper-writing done, muse or no muse.
Most often I work by the power of a different deity anthropomorphism. I call him Hard Work. He looks more like Mr. Clean with a big wooden paddle he whacks me in the butt with every morning.
But just because I get up and have to write and read and study every day doesn’t mean I should subject you to all to the misery of reading what I might spew out on a given morning if I were required to write to you with greater frequency than I currently manage. You deserve better. In fact, I believe you deserve less.
The internet is full of more. Oh, so much, much, writing. One of my great fears about the future of the world is that Google will get so filled up with pages of links to crap like this (you know you can’t resist that link) that the actual quality stuff out there gets lost forever on the third and fourth pages of Google searches. I know it happens already.
But I resign to be somebody who might get lost on the third page of Google searches, but who writes stuff well worth reading for those of you who have dug down deep enough to find it. I appreciate you beyond words. I feel deeply the responsibility I have to you. I want to give you more than regurgitated news-vomit.
I hope you are also with me in believing that writing doesn’t have to be new to be good. Another of my biggest fears is that we as a society will base such a great portion of our reading on search tools that are determined by what is new that we’ll miss the good old stuff. And by old, I don’t mean just way back to Milton (he has long since been somebody read only by freaks and students fearing for their grades, and that’s a great loss). I mean old like last Thursday.
So instead of more frequent blog posts, I happily offer you a reminder of the obvious, if you’re a blog reader. There are those cool categories and tags over in my right-hand column. You can click them, and you can read stuff I wrote a year ago, and most likely it’s no worse than it was when I wrote it. If you’ve already read everything I’ve written here (bless your heart, I don’t understand you), go find somebody’s else’s good blog.
There’s more than enough. Praise God, the Muse is out there; she has not stopped working. She’s out there spreading the love around while I get some sleep.
Love. This. Post. I struggle with the same thing. Felling the pressure to get more, more, MORE out there in my blog but really wanting it to be inspired. That muse is a tricksy hobbit- not showing up when I need her and gracing me when I have only a little time between when one son goes down for a nap and the other arrives home from school. Why can’t my muse work on my timetable!? I like your quality inspired stuff. I will keep reading because I know that the muse is worth waiting for even if it seems like forever between posts!
First, of course I clicked on the link!
I end up not posting because it takes me a week to decide what I think of what happened last Thursday and then, like you say, it is old. I have exactly one news reference on my blog because I had written the post already and then the example of all examples happened to break that day.
Theodore Roosevelt quote I saw today on Twitter: “Nine-tenths of wisdom consists in being wise in time.” Sigh.
Thanks for your comment and writing-friend-support as always, Jess. And Loafingcactus, I don’t know where you got that name, but I think it nicely describes how i feel some days when I’m working at my computer–somewhere between wanting to loaf around and being a mean prickly cactus!
Thank you, Chrissy! i so appreciate your hard work and your wonderful writing. Thank you for putting blogging into perspective.
I will have you know, my dear friend, that about two and a half years ago my hilly-billy uncles dropped a shot squirrel off on our doorstep with the challenge: skin it and eat it or admit you’re city. Thanks to the good ole’ net we skinned that tree rat & put her/him in a delicious curry. And they called us citydiots.
Know that I love your muse regardless of when she does, or does not, choose to make her most grand appearance. My muse simply talks to often and too quickly for me to catch up with her. I believe I would rather have her sleep for a short time.
With joy…
Jess, nice work on the squirrel. I really did sincerely google how to skin a raccoon the other day. Zeke wants to make a coonskin cap this summer, and we have no shortage of those fat chicken-eaters around here. We learned how to skin one, but also learned that it’s hard to get the leather very soft, so I next googled “leather tanners in Madison,” but haven’t found anything yet, so we’re stuck at the moment. Much joy.
I don’t like ‘more’ … I like this. Real is good.
[...] in that is Wisdom. The whole chapter shows this female character called Wisdom (a lot like my friendly Muse) dancing around during creation, shouting in public, promising riches better than gold and silver, [...]