One Writer's Secret

One secret -- don't tell anybody -- is that I've never written on the screen until I started blogging. That is, I always wrote on yellow legal pads with a fountain pen, (Pelican or Waterman) and sometimes a rolling writer (Uniball Fine Point) and then transcribed stuff to the computer and the transistion between yellow legal pad to computer was really a big editing clean up. For YEARS other writers who knew me well enough to know I wrote in this antiquated way would chide me about not writing directly to the computer screen but it has always given me the heeby-jeebies. It seemed to be this strange animal that made a funny purring sound, ready to strike, poised on it's haunches ready to gobble up my words. It made me nervous. It seemed to want something from me. I didn't like the noise of it and also I've never felt like the computer was even remotely trustworthy as a repository for words. Here today, gone tomorrow.

And I've always felt like writing was blood coming out of your hands if it was any good at all. And the closest thing to blood coming out of my fingers was ink coming out of a fountain pen onto a yellow pad of paper. Funny about those yellow pads, when you go back to look at the words, they are usually there and they rarely say, FILE DELETED or some other frightening thing. And I think writing is about handwriting. I know that's a perfectly ancient way to think, but if I had to pick between a hammer and chisel to engrave my words and the computer, I'd pick up the chisel just as fast as can be. I'm especially nutty about writing out poems in long hand. Listen to the words, "long hand" and there's something absolutely real for me about that -- while the computer feels extremely untrustworthy to me.

And then came Blogger, which we all must admit in the beginning was extremely untrustworthy and I would some days write paragraphs and paragraphs and press post and it would have better been labeled DISAPPEAR. But there was something about Blogger ... what was it ... it was light, airy, sans gravity, it was just there, anywhere, in an office, at Kinko's, in a friend's back room on a Saturday early evening when everyone else was drinking beer, but you politely explained to your already tipsy hostess that you'd pass on the beer, but was there anywhere you might slip into a private room and ... Christ it was dirty and hot and almost as fun as stealing her husband for a few hours to fuck while no one was watching ... could you please BLOG a little in private? And shit, she gave you quite a look, but the beer had already hit her pretty hard, so you knew she'd take you to the family computer and plop you down in front of the screen and you only had to escape the 12-year-old's Sim City and the 5-year-old's Reader Rabbit, get on the Net some way or another and you were COOKING WITH GAS. You were driving fast with 100 bucks in your pocket, a full tank of gas, no map and all the windows rolled down.

And everything I ever learned about writing didn't matter anymore. Everything I ever thought about writing went out the window as the breeze blew through my hair and the words poured out of me. I didn't have to take writing seriously. I didn't have to take words seriously. I didn't have to sound like anyone else. I didn't have to sound like The New Yorker -- which weirdly, I sometimes sound like a little by NOT TRYING TO SOUND LIKE IT. So it showed me that I had a lot of hang-ups about writing and it showed me how to get over them fast. It showed me how to sound like myself. It gave me back my voice, which surprised people and surprised no one as much as it surprised me. Blogging was a place I could go and be me, completely, totally, unapologetically me. And if people didn't like it, screw 'em. And I could write the hell out of the screen and if it blew up and disappeared, it didn't matter anyway, because I could always come back and try something else again later. So despite all my inclinations towards bottles of ink and pads of paper, I started to blog and blog and blog and blog and there was no stopping me.

And there was the intra-blogging to consider, something I hadn't counted on and was definately not available in any other form of writing I've ever done. My words weren't stuck on a pad of paper with no friends. If Doc was writing something funny, I could write back. If AKMA was praying for us, I could throw a prayer or poem up on my site. If I was writing about Alpha Males and I needed a picture of James Bond's Wet Nelly, I could link. I was connected to every other word every written for God sakes -- try that for a RUSH when it comes to a drug a writer can really get high on. I was connected to all my other little wordwarriors and loving what they were writing. I was connected to all their thoughts, to their minds and my hostess was happy I wasn't fucking with her husband's brain or any other part of him for that matter, but I was messing with the minds of a million or so strangers. And isn't that what writers are supposed to do???????????????????????????????