Well, what are YOU doing here?

Dammed if I know what I’m doing in the blogosphere. I may be uptight but I’ll admit many things go better without a plan: road-trips, tough-chats with the boss, life, to name a few. Blogs I’ve read have a nice spontaneity about them that suggests the same is true of blogging. So, true to form, the control freak that rules my brain just bullied my gut instinct into shutting up, and I, on post number three, will explore my motivation for blogging.

So far the act of writing is reason enough. I am not by nature a concise person. Disorganized, poorly punctuated, rambling, free-associations bang around in my old dome-piece all day long. Squeezing several days worth of those into something concise enough to “read well” is rather satisfying. When I can imagine the reader (hello, are any of you out there?) laughing it is even more so. This is a surprise. I spent the better part of my education dreading papers, essay tests, really any occaison I had to put pen to paper with the knowledge someone else would read my handiwork. I like to think I’ve grown as a person, but probably its just the pseudo-anonymity of the internet.

Being a reader, though is what got me started. From the NY times, to fiction, to those freebies papers you find in the corner store, I’ll read anything, just to hear what folks have to say. If something has printed on paper and displayed in a place from which I can purchase it/borrow it though, an editor, usually someone other than the writer, has deemed it worthy of publication. I accept that. Before the internet, I did so without thinking about the writing that didn’t make the cut. Blogs, the written word without that middleman, have made me a more active reader, one who views reading as a form of communication in symbiosis with writing, which has attracted me, a reader, to writing.

What about you? Why do you blog? Read blogs? Bring on the comments, I’d love to hear.