Pretending to Write

The Visible Woman...writes.

At some point after I retired I printed some business cards on the laser printer that had, below my name, "Pretending to Write, But Really Just Blogging." I was a pretty assiduous blogger for a while, too. Then it collapsed. At about the same time I started tweeting. I took a red pen to some of those cards and struck out 'write' and wrote 'blog.' And I struck out 'blogging' and wrote 'tweeting.' It was sad but true. I like looking back at my old journal/blog entries with their attempts at focus and, in some cases, incredible detail. The twitter archive and facebook timelines are fun in the same way. But it's harder to dig in and figure out just what was in your head and heart.

Now I tweet and tweet some more. I connect my tweets to facebook and they appear there, too. Occasionally I upload pictures to facebook directly. I share, I comment, I retweet. If I wasn't committed to Holidailies that's all I'd be doing.

Tweeting is interesting. I usually have something to say. I want to say it in one tweet breath of 140 characters. I type it out. And...it's too long. Sometimes by a lot. (See above.)

Then I edit.

And edit again and again and again and finally tweet and then it appears on facebook.

Along the way, articles, proper punctuation and spelled out conjunctions are sacrificed. You regret you didn't use one of the spare characters to put a comma between a couple of words. And then you say to yourself: how could anyone possibly care about this 'writing.' My English Textbook for my freshman year in college was called Writing with a Purpose. This sort of publishing was never anticipated! Of course, neither were blog entries of self-indulgent detail like this one. And what, after all, is the purpose?