Blog as Inbox

I‘ve had a few people ask me a rather good question: Why do I blog, and, on a more general sense, why do I write?

Because I can, is my pat response.

But it struck me this morning that in many ways this blog is my inbox for my writing projects outside of work. Any writer, of course, is always writing, and I’m lucky enough to have enough diversified types of writing going around that I’m able to stay fresh (OK, at least active if not necessarily original 100 percent of the time. Or even 10 percent of the time). Waaay back when I was a newspaper reporter, for instance, I noticed my creative writing was suffering, because a lot of the things I was writing at the day job were intruding onto that platform. I had a hard time separating the two creative veins. Now that my day job is mostly technical writing, there’s little to no interference. And I have Uncharted, which is like journalism but is most importantly like the stuff I really enjoyed in journalism, so it doesn’t feel like work. Much.

But it’s on this blog that I get to kick around ideas, try a few writing and rhetorical exercises, think out loud and otherwise do some experiments. Not everything here is a gem. Most of it is absolute crap. But there are a few things I can read and re-read and think, well, that wasn’t too bad.

Just like Mr. Incredible and Frozone, I like to write to “stay loose.” While most of the time I may resemble an incompetent bad guy, I realize a lot of what I do here is just clearing out the inbox, then filling it up again with other little ideas. Hope that helps. Some of the things I work on for this blog may turn into something quite different. Others may go nowhere. But at least I'm using the ol' brainium every day. That's what counts.