Technical Poet, Redefined

Creative people need a safe place to create. As Stephen King wrote in On Writing, we need to be able to create with the door closed, without any possibility of scrutiny or judgment. We need to be able to create for ourselves first, to get it all out there, before the real work of destruction—and hence, growth—can begin.

In an effort to create a “safe place” not only for myself but for my readers, a year or so ago I took my original blog, Breathless Noon, and divided it into two: one blog dealing strictly with writing and design, and the other for everything else. The idea was to allow myself the freedom to babble on about professional concerns that might only be interesting to me without feeling like I was boring the piss out of everyone else.

What resulted was two stilted, vapid blogs, both yearning for their significant others.

People are complex; artistic and creative types overly so, Sagittariuses ruefully so, those of us born on December 16 pathologically so. A friend of mine once told me that I wasn’t crazy, just erratic and unusually mutable. He said I brayed at the moon because I worshiped her inconsistency. I resisted that definition for a time, but am coming to appreciate the truth of it. My interests and passions are not only varied but capricious—one might even go so far as to call me serially obsessive.

This can make for a difficult time deciding what a blog is supposed to be about.

And worse, it makes for a very stifled blog when such a crazed person is trying to restrict herself only to writing what she believes another person (an ill-defined person, at that) might be interested in reading. It makes for lonely work. Lonely, drab work. And writing is supposed to be anything but lonely and drab.

So I decided to merge the blogs again, to let myself be erratic and mutable and frenzied if that’s the price I have to pay to be honest, forthright, and passionate. No one benefited from the attempt to separate myself into neat little boxes. Perhaps it was ludicrous to even try. The best way to present myself is all or nothing, and let the pieces fall where they may.

If nothing else, it will at least be interesting.

This is the result. The blog at Breathless Noon will come offline and my writing will live here. Readers will have to decide for themselves what topics they are interested in and which they aren’t, and to that end I can offer at least this one bit of solace: I have decided what this blog is about.

This is a blog about writing.

That’s not to say that I intend to sit here and pontificate about the technicalities of writing, or bemoan the dearth of good writing in our fast food culture, or that I’m going to offer a compilation of 101 writing tips that you could have, and perhaps should have, learned in high school. But what it does mean is that this blog is about the life of a woman who has defined herself as a writer since she was 8 years old. It’s a blog of someone who feels obligated to give some meaning, some color, some depth and rigor to the web. This is a safe place for me to wring beauty out of myself, whether in the form of fiction, creative non-fiction, or annotated observation.

This is a blog that venerates words and language, prose and experience, literature and pragmatism. In short, it’s a writer’s blog.

So. With all that said and done, I present the new Technical Poet, which is unfinished but at least alive, and which I hope contributes to a literate, colorful web.

(*I suffered some technical problems in the merging of my two databases, the most notable is that comments were lost for many of the posts migrated from Breathless Noon. I’m working on correcting that, but remain unsure how long that will take.)