Monday 16 September 2013

Verbal Diarrhea

I have a problem with this blog. I have a sneaking suspicion that it might be a little boring. At the very least, it's not interesting enough that anyone wants to comment on it. But then, I'm a little bored with it, and I probably wouldn't comment on it either.

Whenever I feel like that, I remind myself that having a kazillion people follow my my blog isn't my goal. Just writing, and getting better at writing, is.

One of the many goals I have with writing is to have it get easier to do. In other words, I'd like my first drafts to just flow from my brain to the keyboard. Usually I pause a lot as I think of how to perfectly word what I'm thinking so that other people think it's awesome (I'm doing it right now, dammit). It's become an annoyance. Sure, it makes rewrites easier (or non-existent), but I don't think it makes all the pieces better as a whole because sometimes the awesome creative bits get stuck behind the filter.

I've been reading "The Frog Principle" series on Jennifer Crusie's blog and it's pretty much telling me to be more creative and less OCD now; I can worry about perfection later (like when the "toddler-crab" isn't trying to pull Mommy off the chair with its distracting pincers).

Another purpose (I just changed that--purpose used to read "point"--I'm doing it again!) of my blog is to serve as a venting ground. It's a place where I can be happily snarky and bitchy, if I so choose to be. Sometime when I was setting up labels I thought to make one titled "Verbal Diarrhea." I thought, Do you really want to think of your writing as crap? Because, isn't that what diarrhea is? Violently ejected crap? So I changed it to "Verbal Streams." Because Streams are so much prettier than Projectile Poop.

What.The.Fuck? I know I wasn't stoned on anything because I was breastfeeding at the time. Was I sleep deprived? How did I go from Snarky and Witty to freaking Vanilla and Purty? Seriously. (Head shake.)

Okay, no, I don't want my writing to be associated with crap (except for when it obviously is shit), but if diarrhea is "flowing through" to the Greeks, then surely it can apply to words that flow through from my brain to the computer without any interruption at all.

This post has mostly been that. I've stopped a couple times: mostly to fix typos, a couple times deal with whatever disasters my kids were about to get into, and once to get ice cream--at my toddler's suggestion (he's awesome, and it was Hagan Daas' Mayan Chocolate, so it was awesome), but other than that--oh, hang on a sec--disaster four averted--I've just let it go.

Anyway, things are getting rambunctious and I have to see if this sick and coughing mommy can convince a sick but restless toddler to be quiet enough that I can get the sick and coughing baby to go to sleep for a bit. But, before I go, I'll be labeling this post as Verbal Diarrhea.

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