Blogging Blues

Yeah, I know that's a cheesy title for a blog post, but I can't help myself. That's just the way I feel. I have missed blogging so much, but I am really struggling to get back into the swing of things. I used to have no problem just rattling the thoughts in my head onto this screen. Now I find that I'm censoring myself a lot. I'm doing a lot of editing.

Maybe it's the drywall dust settling into my brain after all this remodeling. Maybe it's paint fumes.

No, I do believe the culprit is fiction. I've been doing a lot of reading about story structure, finding YOUR story, and things like that. I have a story in me, I work on it all the time. I can feel it, the way I can hear rhythm in random footsteps, and feel melodies in my blood. But fiction writing is very different from blogging. Blogging is so off-the-cuff and wonderful, very 'stream-of-consciousness', which tends to work well for me, since I have a tendency to ramble and obsess about things. Fiction, though, is all about structure--putting your protagonist up a tree, throwing rocks at him/her, and then finding a way to get them down. I also have a tendency to get lost in the details--for example, when my sister Tracey and I were children, and we played Barbies together, if the dolls were sitting down eating dinner together, I needed to know what they were having. If they were going to school, I wanted to know their schedule.

Some folks might say that's a tad obsessive. Hi, have we met? I'm Josie and I'm obsessive.

Anyway, details have their (very important) place in a story, but details do not a story make.

So here I've been, trying to blog, trying to write, and it's very difficult. I tend to get very caught up in one while neglecting the other. (Obsessive, remember?) I suppose the struggle here, like with everything else in life, is to find a balance.

I hope you will all stay with me with I find it.

Tomorrow: American Idol, Los Angeles auditions