What am I doing here?

Well.  Here I am.  Blogging.  I'm so interesting that I figure that the world will be a better place if I share my thoughts with you.

Okay, I'm really blogging because I want to be a writer, and I can't think of a better way to practice than to write.  I spend so much time reading the blogs of other writers, instead working on the greatest romance novel yet to be written, that I may as well add to the blog footprint.  Who knows?  Maybe I will help other wannabe writers procrastinate just a little bit more. 

I have always kept the idea of writing fiction in the back of my mind, but it's a scary prospect for me.  I majored in English for all of a semester in college, but I kept hearing the voice in my head (it sounded alot like my mother) saying, "That's great, honey, but how are you going to make a living?" So I changed my major, learned a few marketable skills, got a job, got married, got kids (okay, I helped make them, I didn't just get them at the grocery store), started doing alot of really wonderfully creative things without ever taking the time to try to write more than a couple of lines here and there.

Writing is scary.  I worry people will think I am putting my deepest fears and most closely held fantasies on display for the world to judge and psychoanalyze.  I don't know why that should scare me so much. Everyone who knows me is aware of my craziness and many of them love me anyway, but still.  They might think they are finding out more about me than they want to know.   But let me say here:  IT'S FICTION!  It's all a "what if" game. 

But the ideas keep popping up, and it seems a bit wasteful to throw them out.  I may never finish anything, show it to anyone, or submit a manuscript, but I think I'd like to try.  I've written the first chapters for two novels.  Maybe not a full chapter, that seems like kind of an arbitrary measurement anyway...who decides how long a chapter is?  There don't seem to be any hard and fast rules about where to divide things up...but maybe I just haven't gotten that far.  Hey, I know when a scene starts and ends!  Maybe I should say that I have written several scenes for a couple of books.  The committee in my head is very critical of what I am doing and how I am doing it.  I think I'll address each critic individually in future posts.