Is this Brave New World of Blogging for Me?

Is this Brave New World of Blogging for me? by Sybil Barnes
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I don’t remember when I learned to read.  It seems like something I have always done and always enjoyed. I can be transported to Oz or Everest or the blue highways at the turn of any page. I find the list of ingredients on cereal boxes fascinating.
In addition to being a reader, I always thought that I was a writer. I wrote letters to my friends and kept a diary until I began to call it a journal. I wrote little plays for the neighbor kids  to perform in the backyard, created graphic novels from pictures cut out of the pages of catalogs and magazines,  and thought up dialog to speak when we played cowboys and indians at school recess.
In fifth grade, I wrote a haiku which was published in a national anthology. I can’t remember it now. Maybe it went something like:
From the car, I see
Ponies on the grass. Alas
They do not see me.
Were the judges impressed that a fifth grader would try to paraphrase or plagiarize Gertrude Stein? Am I kidding myself that I knew who Gertrude Stein was in 1960? Maybe she was an entry in the 1950 Book of Knowledge which was our home reference source. I just liked the way grass and alas sounded together. And I thought poetry, even Japanese poetry, had to rhyme. I realized much later that someone having their name in an anthology probably guaranteed another sale of the book. Maybe more than one if they had a large family.

Skip ahead another decade. I graduated from college but I didn’t want to live in a city. So I came back to the mountains and got a job in food service. Then I bought  a book store. After the 90-day economy of Estes Park and my own propensity to spend more than whatever profits I made in the remaining 275 days on entertainment of various forms convinced me that I wasn’t cut out to be a businesswoman,  I was hired at the library. I still wasn’t writing anything. When anybody asked, I said I was working on a children’s book about my cat.

So many years past that early success, I’m still not a writer. I get up before dawn  to walk dogs or drive the mail to Allenspark and then I walk some more dogs or go to the library or a book group and then I walk some more dogs  or scoop some litter boxes and go out to eat  and maybe sit down with somebody else’s novel and fall asleep before the 10 o’clock news. Some afternoons or nights I go to movies and try to stay awake through them and the drive home from Boulder. Most evenings, I wake up on the couch to some 4 a.m. infomercial or a whining dog who needs to go out.  After I pick up the book I have inevitably dropped on the floor,  I start all over again. 

But maybe a deadline and a word limit will be the ticket to productivity.  I’m only the length of this century late to the party.  And I hope I won’t just add to the general detritus of your day. Or send you down a rabbit hole that will prevent you from realizing your own dreams or projects.  Let’s just see how that goes.