8/16/04

Just for giggles, I was looking at my own web page this morning – and I noticed that I hadn’t added a new blog entry since long before the summer started. How awful, I thought to myself – were I a faithful reader of this blog, I’d be getting pretty pissed by now at the thoughtlessness of the blog writer for not giving me any new material to read for such a long time.

I do my share of daily on-line reading – my links page has a list of some of the sites I frequent most often – and I know I often catch myself thinking “for heaven’s sake, how long does it take you to come out with a new column/cartoon?! I check daily – so why can’t you write something new, say, weekly, eh?” That’s how I know what any faithful reader of these words might be thinking after three months without a single peep from MMB...

Well – not exactly without a single peep from MMB… I have been updating my ongoing fiction on a fairly regular basis – except for Topiara, on which I’ve hit a writer’s block (in case any of you are reading that – sorry about that.) I spend a healthy share of every day writing, although much of what I write now is stuff I’m really hoping to send off to some publisher and actually sell one of these days. Lately has been an exception – I’m working on my next Pretender novel, Out In The Cold, and I’m up to chapter four so far.

Still, looking at my home page this morning got me to thinking – dangerous thing, I know, but it can’t be helped sometimes. I hadn’t written a blog entry for a long time, and (if my feedback for some of my Pretender stuff is any indication) there actually might be folks out there who would like to see something new and who are either fed up or have given up on ever seeing any.

Sometimes, life just seems to stream out of control – to where a fiction writer (who would like to pretend to have a sane mind – as oxymoronic as that might appear) takes no time to write a stream-of-consciousness article. No, instead the pressure is on to “finish that chapter” or “get this out to the beta readers” or “make sure I do my weekly update on schedule” – and not “OK, kid – sit down and just start to type something that speaks more to who YOU are than to the worlds and characters you usually are wrapped up in.”

I even have the usual line of excuses that each and every one of us can and sometimes does haul out to try to justify why we didn’t get this or that finished on time: out of state visitors caused a mad rush to get house cleaned at least a little, social activities, obligations to this one or that which required plenty of prep time out of the day, the occasional illness that knocked one off their ass for a portion of a week, financial crunches that came when something BIG broke down and made a huge dent in the pocketbook, family life (oh, you mean I’m supposed to actually spend time with those people?) and activities, and so on, and so on.

I’m sure you all know the drill.

But from a reader’s standpoint, none of that matters. None of those things happened to them – they never existed. All that exists is the little note on the homepage that says that MMB hasn’t updated her blog since May - BAD MMB.

Expectations. We all have them – we all trip over them every day. Expectations of ourselves, expectations of others, expectations of events, recognition, and so on. We make them each into little pieces of our reality and then complain loudly when REAL reality doesn’t snap to attention and cater specifically to us. We don’t see that we’ve done nothing but to create our own dissatisfaction – not by having the expectations in the first place, but by being attached to them. It is when we move them from the realm of dreams and hopes to “this has gotta happen!” that we manufacture our own misery.

Whether it be getting down the street without having to stop at a single red light, getting that slow jerk in front of one to get the hell out of the fast lane NOW, getting through the annual physical exam without the doctor telling one that one must lose weight and exercise more, getting one’s reading “fix” on time, getting to go to that movie tomorrow night or getting that promotion – dependence upon that which isn’t real is what causes ulcers and road rage and high blood pressure.

Y’all know what? It ain’t worth it.

And ya know what, folks?

I wrote this blog to myself as much as to anyone else.

But at least it’s something new for YOU to read…

About time.