Where blogging falls
Final structural post.
Third post. And the last one explicitly focused on defining the bounds of this place. After this, the going gets tough. It is easy to state the things you want to be. It is difficult to be them.
I am an intensely private person, despite my protests to the contrary. I am proudest of my private writing, which occurs as letters to friends and journal entries to myself. I don't have much to say about my public writing – most of this is cloaked in academic style, and thus not as honest as it could be. The tool in the writer's box I most detest is the omnipotent narrator. What a ridiculous concept! What a frail façade!
[Squiggly ç's are called cedillas – just learned that. Alt-c for all you Mac users out there.]
And I have made no serious attempts at writing fiction. So anything that sprouts here will be infantile by default.
Being experienced in letters and journals, I find this blogging business to be dangerous territory. As I type here in my quiet room, sipping my tea, I feel quite bookish and brilliant. And alone! I might as well be scribbling in the journal on my desk. A blog conveys an intimacy, a false privacy. Rationally, I know that all of this will be shipped soon to the world, on the record, for posterity. But this doesn't register in my habit. I feel as private and protected as ever, here in my room. Maybe that is the allure.
I stated in the last post that transparency will be the first principle here. This is a smidge derivative, I admit (see my employer). But transparency is a flexible term, and I intuit that transparency here will play out far differently than transparency there. When I write letters to my friends, I often self-censor and tailor the piece to fit the friend in question. Writing here for an open audience, I do not have many inputs for the tailoring. Censorship will either be crude, broad, and stifling, or essentially non-existent. I'm aiming for the latter.
That is how I envision my writing here – the cloying intimacy of a journal, broadcast to all. This is going to be very hard for a person like me to do, I promise you.
One more thing: I have kept the content of place very open ended. And I haven't said a peep about the update schedule. I am going to post once a week, likely on Sunday. I might post more frequently.
[rereads: 1, edits: three words cut]