Introduction: Let's Explore Blogging with Owls

I recently discovered audiobooks.  Well, I was aware of their existence before, but I never really got into them.  I like regular books (although I am by no means a Kindle-hater - mine has been wonderfully useful), and audiobooks, needing a cassette player or CD player, always seemed more trouble than they were worth.  However, a friend at work told me that you could now download audiobooks from the local library in MP3 format, and you can then listen to them right on your phone/iPod.  I take public transit to and from work, and sometimes it is so crowded that I cannot even hold a book in front of me.  This new audiobook program seemed like the perfect fix.

Because I knew that the reader can make or break an audiobook, I rented the newest David Sedaris book, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls (the title of which obviously inspired the title of this entry.  I apologize to any readers who were expecting some sort of ornithology blog).  Sedaris usually reads for his own audiobooks, and he is absolutely fantastic at it.  I've heard him live during his book tours, and he loses nothing in the recording.  Due to my long commute, I finished the book in two days.

It was great, although not enough to topple my favorite, Me Talk Pretty One Day.  It was still immensely funny, and I would highly recommend it (the audiobook in particular, if you can get it).  As good as the book was, however, you may be wondering why I'm talking about it in this first blog post.  In one of his essays, Sedaris mentions that he has been journaling since 1977.  The journals take up multiple shelves, and just the index for all of them is 288 pages long.  He writes in the morning about the day before.  Every morning  Some of these journal entries provide the basis for future, published essays, but that's not the main purpose of this undertaking.  In an NPR interview, he talks about keeping his personal diary and his published essays separate, as well as his private self and his public persona as a professional writer.

While I don't plan on using this blog quite so compulsively (hopefully, I'll update a few times a week), I liked the idea of keeping a journal as a way of warming up for other kinds of writing.  And, at the very least, a journal keeps you writing.  It sounds idiotic, but I've always found that the hardest part of writing is the writing part.  Even if you have already plotted an entire novel in your head, there's nothing quite like staring at a blank Word document and suddenly realizing: books are long, and, good God, they have so many words in them.  Words that I have to put there.  It can be very disheartening for aspiring authors (likely for professional ones as well).  I'm hoping to overcome that blank-page panic a little by keeping a consistent blog, which is admittedly something that I've not been able to do in the past.

So, this blog is about whatever I want it to be about.  Some of it will be a journal, some of it will be creative writing, and some of it will be something in between (i.e., I'll lie to make my life seem more interesting).  I'll also do book, movie, and TV show reviews, because those things are a large portion of my life.  Maybe, if you're lucky, there will be some rants thrown in as well.  Like I said: everything's fair game.

Now that I've given a little bit of a introduction to this blog and explained why I'm here, please enjoy this video of David Sedaris talking about catheters (it sounds weird, but trust me - it's worth it):