I started blogging after Passing for Thin was published and Amazon invited authors to blog. It was hugely successful and led to the next book. At some point, however, I began to want to be able to manipulate things -- add links, advertise my other web stuff, post photos, so I left that blog space and started Car on the Hill. If anyone wonders about the title, it's taken from the Joni Mitchell song of the same title. It's a sad song about waiting for a man to show up, which is an apt description of my life.
I wonder, if I were a consistent blogger, if I'd be some web cult figure. I don't regret not being one so this is purely speculative.
It's nice when people say they like my writing or offer consolation for my various nervousnesses, but once in a while someone says I've written about something in a way they have needed to explain it to people in their lives. Sometimes someone says my muddling on gives them courage to muddle on through life with their own demons nipping at their ankles.
And those are the comments that make me feel OK about what I do here, that maybe I'm even doing a service.
I worry that I am perfecting my anxiety, fear, obesity, introversion, writer's block, financial precariousness, House addiction, smoking, borderline agoraphobia, regrets and misanthropy for the sake of something to say. I worry that I'm another person yammering on about the last least incident. Readers have, in the past, told me to get over myself and shut up.
Oh, Lord, if only I could, I just sighed upon writing that sentence.
I splatter here what I hurl at myself. It seems that sometimes it helps to know one is not alone in that silent dialogue, that everybody fucks up, that other people are weak and insecure. Part of my insecurity, and I'm sure other people have it too, is that I'm a public fool. So thank you to everyone who reads this morass, and thank you especially for letting me know that I'm not alone in the Horrors either.