M.L. Swift, Writer

Snowflake by Yellowcloud, Flickr

After creating this blog a year and a half ago, questions arose that needed answers before I took another step or made another post.  How do I start?  In what direction should I take this?  Is the target audience writers or care givers?  How personal should I be?  Who am I?

You get the gist.  This was a scary world…and it was difficult for me to get past the trepidation and take a step.  I believed everything I had ever heard about the perils of the internet.

So I tip-toed through the blog patch of the writer’s community to jot down a few ideas, see what others were doing, get a feel for things, and saw out in the vast blogosphere…how unique we all were.  We were experiencing the same things, writing on the same topics, but approaching them in styles as unique and brilliant as the snowflake in the picture.   Like our authorial voices, our blogs made statements as individual as the voices of Hemingway and Stein; statements that defined each of us as a writer, artist, and person.

Soaking in post after post, I learned that many of us are creative types in all aspects of our lives.  It’s in our nature.  When we’re not writing, we’re singing, painting, playing musical instruments, acting, dancing, etc., all in an effort to do the bidding of our muses.  To free our souls.  We’re expressive folks with a need to make something out of nothing and do it in such a way that people stand back and say, “Wow.”

Julie, over at A Thought Grows, is one such treasure who writes and shares and rants and raves to us about the joys (and struggles) of writing and publishing her break-out novel, all with grace and a kind word.  When she’s not writing great fiction, she blogs, reads, reviews books, jogs with her dog, sings, and is picking up the mandolin.  I honestly don’t know how she does it.

Through it all, I learned that the best way to proceed with my blog is to simply be me.  Write for me.  Say what I want to say, how I want to say it.  Let my authorial voice resound.  Proudly join in the collective uniqueness that makes us writers, each a treasure in our own right, then stand back and hope that people say, “Wow.”

Does your blog look like you?  How?

Peace,

ML