Hmmmmm.....

The terror of looking at a white page and imagining how it will be filled is unmatched by any other circumstance. -Randy Higgins

I'm not afraid of speaking in public, even if I don't have anything to say. Snakes are what shotguns were made for. But writing is scary. I think my terror of writing was originally instilled by Ms. Lafayette in third grade. She was continually demanding cute little essays before I could move on to other classroom activities. My fantasy was to get my hands on the classroom chemistry set and mix things until I developed smoke, glowing puddles of molten goo, or some other suitable destruction. I usually ended up looking out the window, drawing a picture of a house, and lying about how great my dog was.

Ms. L had one other continual critique of my work. She said, 'use your own words'. I asked her, 'what's wrong with these words?' She seemed to think that I should be able to plagiarize the textbook without actually using the author's exact thought. I felt like if I was going to tell someone exactly the same thing that I had just read, I could use exactly the same words I had just read!

So I never felt the urge to journal endlessly and put every thought to paper. Writing has almost always been an obstacle to something I'm really interested in. Strange then that I have this impulse to blog.

It's associated with the infinite number of book titles in my mind. I don't have the chapters, but I do have titles. My best chapters are already written by someone else who has said it better. I have found over and over again that when I start to get organized and outlined, I find a published article or book that has already said it better than I ever could. When I find the title that has no book to go with it, I'll write it.

In the mean time, I need to practice my typing. So here it is. My first blog. Enjoy it (or endure it) and look for more to come.