I belong to a book club.  We’ve only read two books and now, reading the third, I am struck by how hard it is to write a good book.  I really like the book we chose – by accident really – and I can hardly stop reading it to write this.  I am sure that most people who write blogs try to write some sort of book too and I am no exception.  I have a lot of projects going.  Is that because I am afraid to commit to one more than to another?  I write or edit old short stories that I have put away safely for a long time.  2014 is the year they get to sashay out and shake their pretty skirts and win a prize (will they?) Who cares if they win a prize anyway?  I should just be happy to have them out wandering around being picked up and loved or discarded by readers.  One story is about Dorothy and if I am to take the good advice I paid for at the writers’ conference in Mexico this February, I should take a week to find out who Dorothy is, what color she likes, what her apartment is like, what she likes on her pizza, before I write another word of her story. The speaker even said I should cut things out of magazines like pictures of the rooms where she lives and stick them up all over my apartment so I get a feel for where Dorothy lives.  I wonder if I could ever find a room messy enough in a magazine.  Not that I think of Dorothy as a particularly messy person but the rooms in magazines are neat and beautiful and made to sell things.  I will do that this week, though.  I will fill pages and pages of facts about Dorothy so that even if I never use them in the story, I will really know Dorothy and she will be a real person.

I am writing all this about Dorothy so that I don’t write about something else.  Maybe I will write about that something else in a few days.  Are blogs just here to show one can have the discipline of writing and to entertain random people and to create a “platform” for publishers?  Are blogs here to confess?  Is it too scary for writer and reader if the “thing” is painful or too revealing? What would Dorothy do, I wonder?  Dorothy gets terribly tired in the Spring time.  The bright light, even when it is not sunny makes her eyes heavy and she has to sleep.

The picture shows the sun and above it the moon.