Priorities

I had been telling myself that these daily small blog posts are musical scales or pliés at the bar.

Then Rebecca Solnit writes this great piece on Lithub, in which she says (among 9 other other helpful tips):

1) Write. There is no substitute. Write what you most passionately want to write, not blogs, posts, tweets or all the disposable bubblewrap in which modern life is cushioned. But start small: write a good sentence, then a good paragraph, and don’t be dreaming about writing the great American novel or what you’ll wear at the awards ceremony because that’s not what writing’s about or how you get there from here. The road is made entirely out of words. Write a lot. Maybe at the outset you’ll be like a toddler—the terrible twos are partly about being frustrated because you’re smarter than your motor skills or your mouth, you want to color the picture, ask for the toy, and you’re bumbling, incoherent and no one gets it, but it’s not only time that gets the kid onward to more sophistication and skill, it’s effort and practice. Write bad stuff because the road to good writing is made out of words and not all of them are well-arranged words.

Ah well. Yes, but. Because learning to hear and express my own voice, and to document the slivers of my daily life, are important to me as part of the larger picture. It helps me with the other, more important, less ephemeral work.

This may be the "bad stuff" I'm writing on the road to something better - the toddler talk. But if my blog is my sandbox, who cares? The two or three folks who might read it are obviously already kind, tolerant and gracious folks, or they would be reading something more substantial anyway. So thank you, gracious reader(s), for your indulgence in my warm-up exercises.