Blogging

I used to check email regularly. When an email first appeared in my inbox, it was promptly read, replied to, and deleted. An email was saved only if it were extremely important, like my correspondence with Seattle photographer Elke Vandevelde. There’s nothing pretty about my inbox these days. I don’t know why, but it actually feels like the walls are closing in on me when my emails won’t fit on the same screen, a silly response to a first-world problem.

Email isn’t the only thing I’ve let slide. This blog, I’m sorry to say, has sat neglected like the cardboard carton of Thai Jasmine rice in the back of our fridge from the last time we had take-out.

You see, it’s been a few months since the morning I met Jody at the Panera at Renton Landing and nicolektwedt.com went live. I knew then (and I know now) that having a place to write is more important than having a pretty blog. Even so, I assumed that I would have this blog-thing figured out by now.

Dear friend, I still don’t have my act together. Perhaps you’ve noticed. There’s no way to leave comments on this blog. There’s not even a way for you to contact me. I still haven’t subscribed to Mail Chimp or Tiny Letter so you can’t read posts when I actually write them. I wonder at times if I have what it takes to be brave and make this writing place happen.

Ah well, baby steps.

Perhaps being brave in this situation means to keep writing anyway.

There’s more We’re going through something with our middle guy, Steven. I’m optimistic about his situation, honestly I am. All the same, at the end of a long day of parenting a unique child and his sisters, I’m done. The last thing I want to do is work behind the scenes on this blog. I just want to write. Or binge-watch a series on Netflix with Greg. Our read a few chapters of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing while he watches yet another episode of Heartland.

And that’s okay.

This little online place will come together in time. Thanks for being patient with me.

Edited to add: I don’t know how I did it, but there’s a comment section following this post!

Today’s my blog’s birthday. Kind of. Eight months have come and gone since I first payed the fees and did all I needed to snatch a domain and launch a little place on the internet where I can go to gather my thoughts. Except the launching part never happened. I didn’t know what to do to make this place look like a living, breathing, functioning blog. So I didn’t do anything. How do you create something out of nothing? Writing is all I care about! Not the techno-junk that comes with blogging. Plugins, tags, widgets! Oh my!

This place has become such a spot, ever so slowly and just for me. It’s still new to me, this blog, but I’m starting to use it regularly as a place to pour out my heart and soul through writing, my words under lock and key, for my eyes alone.

But today, by mistake, this baby went live and a blog was born. For the whole wide world to see. The birth was premature, just a bit, but she’s here to stay.

Here’s what happened. I met Jody at a Panera in Renton. She’s a seasoned blogger and willing to help. But a mistake was made when we fiddled behind the scenes with the dashboard. All of the sudden the blog went live. We tried to get it un-live, but neither of us knew what to do. Jody sent a message to her tech-y friend to see if she could kill it. We tried creating a new Coming Soon plugin. Not sure what happened to it.

Normally I would freak out. Maybe not in front of Jody, but alone in a bathroom stall or on the car ride home from Renton. You see, I like things just so. My work doesn’t have to be perfect as perfect doesn’t exist. But anything worth doing is worth doing well. Can I hear an Amen from you melancholies? I know you’re out there.

But something Kimberlee and Emily mentioned a few nights ago came to mind. And what they said slipped from my brain and fell smack into this tender heart of mine. You see, my writer friends told me about G. K. Chesterton and how he wrote, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” So there you have it. Take that, perfectionism! I’m going to be brave and let this blog be what it is. It’s nowhere near ready. It’s not even functioning properly. But it will be someday. Hopefully someday soon, very soon. And until I get my blog’s act together, or pay the big bucks to have someone make it pretty, I’m going to start publishing my work, bit by bit.

Happy Birthday, Blog!