*sings* He-ere We Go Again

Right, right. Blogging. I should really get on that. It's great in concept and execution. A means for those who always have words to say to put words out there for people to either take or leave. It's easy. You open up your web browser and vomit out some words, then you edit them into sentences that people will hopefully want to read. Failed attempts happen, sure. I made one some time ago, and it didn't go all that well. So, by and large, I failed. Like a big lumpy fail whale playing a banjo, I failed. That's okay, though. I'm going to start blogging again, and it's going to go better this time.

See, I've got everything going in my favor. I love writing words. They come pretty easily. And often, too. The reason I stopped was never for lack of love of writing, but for lack of faith in myself. The progression of the craft of writing in a person like me is a funny little process. That process led to a phase, and the phase was complete lack of trust in myself and my own abilities. Here's what happened.

My quest as a writer boils down to the following disgusting mush of boiled goo. At eight years old, my grandpa made me read my first book. Nine years of life followed where I read constantly, going through no less than two novels each and every week no matter what. Then I had this great idea. I'd try to write something. So I wrote shit. I use that term specifically. It was shit. Refuse. Turd salad. But hey, they were novels, and I loved them. Years passed. Over time I worked and studied and learned what good writing is. I learned what sells, what doesn't, what people like to read and what they feel wastes their lives.

That's where I slipped and fell into a rut, hitting a protruding poll with my crotch on the way down. See, all the sudden I knew what quality was, could look back at anything I'd ever written and tell, "woah! That turd salad doesn't taste good at all!" and that sucked. But it didn't so much crush my soul. I didn't have that high and mighty and opinion of my own work. I just enjoyed it. It only made me want to do better, to learn how to create something more professional. Sadly, that's a damn difficult thing to do. So I floundered. I never lost my desire to write. But where before I could vomit out 383497579 words on a given day, all of them dung, now I felt thrilled to see five hundred to a thousand good ones. This feeling applied to blogging.

Where I went wrong was, I adopted a policy of not writing until I knew I could put something good down. This is flawed reasoning. You can't get better without practice. You can't practice without, well, writing. So lately, with the support of my new (and only), gorgeous wife, Colby, I've taken to meeting a light, perfectly achievable word count each day. It's already done wonders for my self esteem, and freed me up some to even write this blog post without wanting to kill myself with an electric drill.

So here. we. GO. My very own attempt to reboot this dead, ugly, smelly blog. As opposed to everyone else's. Day 1. *downs scotch and grabs the wheel*