Day 1 Reflection: Dedication

My list of blog posts

I have written 693 blog posts including this post. In mid-April, this blog will be two years old. I write almost every day unless I’m fighting depression, and even then I usually write.

I don’t always feel motivated to write. I would find it easy to devote myself to writing if I received accolades for it, or if I knew my writing impacted someone in some way. Rewarding a behavior results in more of that behavior — that’s called classical conditioning. In the case of my blog, readership and comments and likes would be the rewards for blogging behavior. However, I only have an average of twenty readers per day, and I have no idea whether they like my work. Comments on the blog and likes on Facebook and Twitter are few and far between.

Still, I write, almost every day.

It takes dedication — in my case, dedication to the craft of writing; dedication to the confraternity of writers; dedication to the concept that it’s important to reflect, to soul-search, to speak truth whether or not anyone listens.

Dedication in the face of obscurity makes me more solid, braced by my convictions that writing is the work of my soul.

Dear Reader:

Thank you for reading this blog.

I know you as data — what country hits come from. I know what posts are being read (but not who is reading what posts), and I know what times random people are posting. Here’s what I know about my readers:

1) I have about thirty hits a day on average. About half of those are from the United States. The rest are from a variety of countries, with Germany holding second place. Other regulars have been from France, Canada, Ukraine, Portugal, and Unknown Region are the most regular.

2) Some of you find me through Facebook, which means I probably know you. Some of you find me from Twitter, and I don’t know if I know you or not. Some referring links are from bit.ly and IFTTT. I’d love to know how the IFTTT link works.

3) Some of you are probably bots. For example, I get about three hits a day from a web address that specializes in “web cam girls”. I don’t follow those links anymore.

4) I don’t know WHO you are. I would love to know who you are. If you’re a regular reader, you know I have said this before, because I mean it. I’m the sort of person who would not only like to sign autographs for readers someday, but chat with readers.

Please, if you know someone who would like this blog (writers, readers, my aunt Edna*) please amplify this and pass it on to them!

Love, Lauren

* I don’t have an Aunt Edna.

Magic in the morning

Yesterday I made Richard stop at the Farmers’ Market while on our way to move my office things back into place for the school year. Little did I know it was to be a magic morning.

First, I should point out that I was wearing my writers’ shirt as I so often do — a t-shirt that says “I’m getting dangerously close to killing you off in my next novel”. That got attention from one woman in her thirties who self-publishes romance novels, a woman my age who dabbled in writing, and a young woman who writes for herself. So we stood around and talked about our experiences in writing, in what it means to be a writer, in dreams and realities.

Not the sort of conversation I expected in Maryville. Which is why it never happened before.

Later, as I walked around the ring of merchants, a little girl on her mother’s lap looked straight at me and said, “That bird over there is singing to you.”

I need no greater magic than this.

Is it necessary to be tortured to write?

I hate Edgar Allan Poe.

Don’t get me wrong, I love his short stories. I tolerate his poems, preferring The Cannibal Flea (I cannot find the author) to Poe’s version.

It’s just that Poe, among other writers, gives the rest of us writers a reputation it’s impossible for us to live down to.

Edgar Allan Poe: an unstable alcoholic who married his 13-year-old cousin and was found dying in a gutter. History attributes his death as resulting from everything from alcoholism to syphilis to rabies.

Virginia Woolf: diagnosed with bipolar disorder, showed antisemitism in several of her written communications despite being married to a Jew, fought against the medical establishment’s treatment of her disorder, committed suicide.

Tennessee Williams: prone to severe vegetative depressions, struggled with drug use, including the amphetamines and Seconal his doctor prescribed, mourned his younger days and loss of sexual attractiveness, died of choking on the cap of some nasal spray.

Dorothy Parker: escaped an abusive childhood, plagued with alcohol problems and self-doubt, put on the Hollywood blacklist for being a suspected Communist.

Even Stephen King had a substance abuse problem — just about every substance, from what I can tell — until he quit in the early 1980’s.

One of my thoughts here, as I read over these synopses, is that all of us, if dissected so thoroughly, would have many of the same issues. Alcohol abuse isn’t the sole province of classic writers, nor is mental illness. My biography would have some of the same elements if I were one of the great classic writers (without the alcohol and drug use, as I like to live life unhindered), but I’m not even published yet, much less classic.

I also wonder if the public documents writers’ demons simply because we expect writers to have demons in order to be able to create. We still suffer from the belief that bipolar and depression create more creativity (the jury’s still out on that; I’m only able to create when the edge is taken off my mood swings).

So, this is our takeway: Everyone has demons, and the demons aren’t what qualify us to write.