On Writing a Blog

One of the benefits of steady writing is the chance to inadvertently spit out a gem among all the chaff.  A gem would not be the previous sentence where I mixed metaphors and generally muddled the point.  Here’s what I really mean:  sometimes I write well.  It might sound boastful until I give you the hard numbers:  for every ten thousand words I’d reckon I get about ten in the right sequence.  It’s like dropping a diamond down the dark hole of an outhouse.  There, was that a better simile?  When I go back and read old blog posts, which is rare, my eyes will sometimes glaze over and I’ll wonder, “Who the hell would ever read this and be entertained?”  But my readers keep coming back, maybe from the tantalizing and time-filling promise of Regular Content Updates.  Some may come just for the pictures, or to catch up on family affairs without having to catch me on the phone in that magic ten minutes after the kids go to bed, before dinner, and before bedtime in a time zone three hours away.  Whatever the reason, people come and maybe they enjoy the same things I do.

Take this one example, in a post I wrote about parenting:  “My daughter is an unfolding lotus and I’ll sit in the garden of my life watching this flower until I close my eyes for the last time.”  I may be the only one who really likes that sentiment because it drills straight down to my feelings of love for my daughter, my feelings of awe of responsibility, my feelings of mortality.  To me it’s a promise I need to live up to, to appreciate my daughter and just watch sometimes, to watch and protect, and to let her unfold in her own miraculous way.  I write for myself and sometimes I please myself.

I hope to keep writing for the rest of my life and hope that there will still be readers out there willing to wade through the 9,990 words in the hopes of finding the ten good ones.  Thanks for reading.

About Peter Soutowood

Writer, architect, father, husband.