Blog writing.

Or, more accurately, web logging. I am no good at it. Why not? I write fiction with passable skill (sometimes even above average style) but when it comes to writing a blog, or god forbid, a diary, I dissolve into a puddle of disorganized gloop. Why is this? Why do I abandon my amassed knowledge of form and style, of purpose and structure, for a frequently unintelligible and certainly not in the least bit entertaining mash up of what I did today blah blah blah?

(That sentence was a travesty).

The minute I open a new draft on Livejournal all of that skill flies out of my head and I begin to write with all the aplomb of a toddler just learning words. It’s embarassing, to say the least. For that reason one of my missions (should I choose to accept) in 2011 is to author a weekly blog. A challenge to myself – a foray, if you will, into the untamed wilderness fondly dubbed The Internet.

Writing a blog is a wholly different venture from penning the next great novel. A novel has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It starts somewhere definitive and goes somewhere equally definitive telling you all the while how it intends to get there. Writing a blog is more like trying to pilot a bamboo raft on white water. You’re never quite sure when you’ll end up overboard, and of course you’re always getting wet. It’s equal parts frustrating and terrifying, and subtextually thrilling. When you’re coasting with abandon amid seas of passionate comments, you’re on top of the world. When you’ve run aground on Troll Beach in the Blogosphere, there is no greater humiliation. It’s all about the instant and the now, and to master the art you must always be current, always be contemporary. If you can spice it up with a few less than PC phrases without tipping into the abyss of gaucheness then more power to you.

Anxiety-attack inducing contemplations aside, this idea has been poking at my brain for weeks now. It’s only 52 weeks. Only 52 essays or stories or random, coherent streams of thought. (Is there an innate oxymoron lurking somewhere in that last line?).  Only 52 attempts at something that has eluded me for far too long, something I should be good at, would be good at if I dedicated time to doing it properly. 52 ways I want to improve. 52 things I want to share with the world. 52 times my better judgment failed me (or impressed me). 52. Fifty-two. That’s all I’m asking.

There are 52 glorious obstacles between me and better blogging and I shall overcome each and every one of them, somehow.