One of Mike's wishes for this blog is, as he mentioned, to give me an outlet and possibly some recognition for my writing. I'm pretty sure that Harper's Magazine editors are browsing Blogger all the time, so no worries on the fame front. It's true that I've always wanted to be a writer, or, as I would have said in the first grade, an "Author." Ever a bookworm, Authors were my idols as a grade school kid. I also wanted to be an Artist, Teacher, Mommy, Singer, Piano Player, and to become famous for my awesome Dirt Bike Riding skills. One goal at a time, though.
When I was first able to read and write, I started making joke books. God knows why I was so enthralled with corny jokes. I collected them from adults, kids, books, and made some up. I composed my books of jokes on construction paper and bound them with staples - they were illustrated in crayon and each unique. The crowning joke of my best ouevre was the following: "If a rooster lays an egg on a hill, which way will it roll down?" Wait for it... "Neither. Roosters don't lay eggs!"
Later, in grade school, we made illustrated books that were sent away to be bound for us. I know I made one, but my memory of my own book is eclipsed by a great scandal that broke out when my younger brother made his book. He wrote about a family vacation we'd taken and described catching a fish in the lake with our dad. But I was there and I knew they'd never caught anything! My indignation that this fabrication actually made it into publication utterly consumed me. I think I'd written about Christmas or something, but none of that mattered when my little brother was perpetrating this great injustice on the world of Authoring.
In college, I centered my Plan of Concentration around - who would've guessed it - making books. Although I majored in art, the illustration of these books interested me only somewhat, and the bindings were even less compelling to me. The concepts and the writing of them pleased me the most.
After college, I had a brief entanglement with a webzine that went nowhere in particular. I wrote some humor pieces and some more serious articles. Although our fan base consisted mainly of friends and various barflys we'd prosthelytized to along the way, I got a thrill out of being almost-semi-not-really-famous for my writing. On one occasion we had a launch party at a bar, and a girl I knew only as a ditzy webzine groupie came up to me and gushed over how much she loved my work. I almost died of happiness on the spot.
I think, sadly, I'm a writer trapped in an artist's body. The pain of my existence is that I'm better at art, but enjoy writing more. I create wall finishes for a living but still dream of toiling over words all day. People who knew me in college always ask if I still draw, and the answer is no, but I have file upon file of random memoir, fiction, or essay scribblings to show for myself - that I never do show.
So here I'm branching out, from regaling my husband to regaling, like, five or six more people. And I can assure you that my husband, too, is a blog waiting to happen. If we can actually sustain our interest in this for more than a week, I promise you, it will be totally sweet.
