A Jen Too Many

I have been tagged, so here is my list!

1. I can take a conversation 17 different directions before getting back to my original point. More often than not a conversation with me is punctuated with at least one person saying, "How did we get on this subject anyway?" From point A to D to W to J to ...

2. I "lose" nouns. I'll be in the middle of a sentence and all of a sudden can't retrieve the word I wanted to use. I wind up having to describe the object I'm talking about because I usually can't remember the word until I hear someone else say it. "The thing, umm, the thing that's, umm, round, and orange, and ..." "You mean an orange?" "No, no, you bounce it, and there's black lines on it ..." "A basketball?" "Yes! That's the word! Thank you!" This only happens to me when I'm talking, never when I'm writing.

3. When I get interested in something new, that's all I'm interested in for at least several days and up to months. I have to make a real effort to get myself to do anything unrelated to my current obsession, and every spare minute I have I spend on it. When I lose interest, it's usually complete. I can go months and never think about my old hobby. Some things are cyclic for me - puzzles and word games are a good example of that. I'll do puzzles for a couple of months and then I'll spend the next several months with half-completed puzzle magazines lying around my bedside table drawer, meaning to get back to them, but not really interested.

4. I play with my hair as I'm falling asleep. It relaxes me.

5. I cannot get a snail mail letter into a mailbox. I will write a letter, put it in an envelope, address and stamp it - and then it languishes forever, never actually leaving the house. I don't know why I do this.

6. My husband reminds me that I tend to put things down on the nearest surface while distracted, then wander around in confusion, asking, "Did anyone see where I put my book? I can't find my book."

Oh, yes! That's right! I have a blog. I suppose I really should update it. Somehow.

Actually I have thought about it before this, but I can't bring myself to actually post a new entry, because, well, people I know, like my family, will be reading this, and that is just too, too intimidating. So, I write, and I polish, and then I rewrite and polish some more, and in the end I have a really great essay on how my family can't ever figure out what they want to eat, that will never see the light of day.

Maybe someday I'll anonymously enter it into the Erma Bombeck contest.

Reason #101 why I will never be a best selling novelist. "What? Read my writing? Are you crazy?"

I belong to a writing list and this is a topic that has come up before. A large number of us are shy (not all of us mind you - an equally large number are not shy at all) which makes it difficult if you want to be a successful fiction writer. After all, if you write technical manuals, web content, or magazine articles you are fairly anonymous (I know an enormously successful magazine writer from that list - you name the major magazine, she's had articles in it - but, unless you are obsessive about reading bylines, you would never recognize her name.)

Writing fiction, however, is very different from selling fiction, and selling fiction tends to be very personality driven. It's not enough to write a brilliant and fascinating novel. You have to travel around and do book signings, interviews on local radio stations and television shows, have a website and interact with your fans. And, since fiction does seem to draw a disproportionate number of writers who are people who really prefer interacting with the characters in their head ...

Look at it this way: The writer puts in weeks and months of solitary work, only to be dragged out of their nest, like Punxsutawney Phil, to blink painfully in the light of attention and publicity when the time comes to convince people their book is really worth publishing / buying / reading.

The problem with being a writer is, you can't help yourself. You write. You have to write. It's a compulsion. And when you write, you usually want someone else to read it. Having a reader is an essential part of the process. Writing that is never read is incomplete. What's the point of putting all that work into finding just the right word to convey the exact way fog feels on your skin, if no-one but you ever reads it? Oh, sure, you've got the satisfaction of personal accomplishment, but it's not enough.

I have found that just as much as I feel driven to write, I feel driven to find readers, which is a painful process. Even bad writing involves delving into yourself. Show someone else your writing and you show them a little piece of your soul. That's frightening. So frightening that I can rarely do it. Essays, fiction, poetry - they make me too vulnerable. Much better to keep them forever in electronic form, locked away in sterile little kilobytes of ones and zeroes.

Wait a second - how did I let my sister talk me into this again?

I had to send some information out the other day, but one of my originals was a very small piece of paper which wasn't going to fit through the fax machine. No problem. I have a spiffy all-in-one home office machine, so I just put it on the flatbed and hit copy.

Hmmm. That didn't go well. Before I was a quarter of the way through the copy the paper had jammed.

I looked in where the paper fed through and quickly found the culprit. A pen had been poked into the paper feed and was now lying horizontally just where it would do the most harm. My hand being much larger than the hand that (undoubtedly) stuck it in there, I couldn't reach it, although I cut the back of my hand trying.

Well, what are children for, if not to fix the messes they have made, right? My oldest was easily able to reach in and pull the pen out.

Problem solved! Back to copying!

Hmmm. Not yet. When I hit the copy button the machine just made rude noises at me and flashed that there was a paper jam.

I checked everything I knew how to open and couldn't see anything, so I went to the manufacturer's website to see if there was anything else I could open (I love the internet! Remember when we had to call and wait for days or weeks for the mail to arrive if we wanted a copy of a repair manual?)

Yes! There was another port. I unplugged the printer from everything so that I could turn it around and upside down, and opened my last chance.

There it was, the real cause of my paper jam - a ramen noodles seasoning packet.

This would never happen in a real office.

Why, yes, I am a geek. Why do you ask?

My little sister has been after me to do a blog. She has a very nice one, which I enjoy reading.

I'm not sure how good an idea this is. I'm not sure I can keep up regular updates, and I'm not sure how my immediate family will react to this. I'm giving it a try though. Especially since I found such a pretty template to try!