steaming piles

The blog writing muse has been absent lately. Perhaps because I spend most of my days reading stuff and writing stuff, I am written out.

My job description at the moment is one word: writer. I send emails on a semi-regular basis to a fair amount of people, so even though I am crap at keeping in touch, I have a high gross level of correspondence. I over use the postal service sending letters and postcards. I keep a pen-and-paper journal that I write in almost every day. Periodically, I blog.

I don't consider myself a writer. If pressed, I grudgingly acknowledge that I am "a person who writes", in much the same way I used to say when I worked in restaurants that I wasn't a cook, I was a salad architect.

I am not exactly sure why I duck away from the mantle of writer.

For one thing, I don't think I am particularly brilliant at wrestling the english language into sentences and prose. I am a verbal person; mentally I am at my best when in the middle of a conversation with smart, quick, interesting people. I love the energy of good conversation at a dinner party. The idea of sitting alone in front of a cataract-inducing computer screen gives me cramps.

Including myself in the pantheon of writers seems to do them a bit of a disservice- diluting the genius, so to speak.

Also, my mother is the writer of the family. Delayed teenage rebellion dictates that I must run away from family occupations even if, secretly, I covet them.

However, since I am locked into being a writer for a year at least, I had better amputate the irritatingly self-absorbed angst and just get on with it. Practice. Writing. Bite the bullet and churn out the shitty first drafts. Torment the blog readers (do you really exist?) with aforementioned shitty first drafts and half baked ideas.

Since this particular forum has no special theme, randomness is endemic.

I am encouraged though. An email that recently landed in my inbox concluded thusly:

"I always get email-envy when I read your lines as they are so well crafted, unlike my steaming pile of email poo."

Email poo. Random self-absorption could get a lot worse.