Does anybody read this?
Does anybody read this? If so, just send me a quick note and let me know.
I've talked about writing this blog before, and about my mixed feelings about writing it, knowing that it may be that no one will ever read it. I've been afraid to ask the question "does anyone read this" for a while now. I suspect no one does, but feared turning that speculation into a fact. I feared what knowing for sure that no one reads this would do to my motivation to keep writing. I still do to some extent.
But on the other hand, there have been quite a few things I was so charged up to write about, that I was glad having this blog gave me the excuse to do so. Having said that makes me wonder if I have some desire I never realized before to be a writer. If so, since I've never spun any fiction to post here (hmm, maybe I should try that), I suspect that as a writer I'd be an essayist and commentator. When I was a kid I used to think about stories I'd like to write, and even tried writing a few. At some point I realized though, that I didn't really want to write them so much as I wanted to read them. I wanted some good author to do a better job than I was at writing them, so I could read them.
I remember one story I tried to write as a kid� I actually did this in front of a typewriter, if anyone remembers what those were. Think of a typewriter as like Word without a monitor or an internet or Quake. ;-p Or smileys. Anyway, it was a story of space exploration, as far as it went anyway. There were two people flying the ship (probably other as yet undefined crew in the rest of the ship), both human, the pilot (male. Psychologically speaking, this was probably me.) and the co-pilot (female), who for some reason I named "Eaton". Yes, in the back of my mind there was going to be romantic potential there, as much as a twelve year old can envision anyway. Yeah, real "Love Boat" quality stuff. So they got to a planet, one of many they were going to discover and explore, did their initial scans while yours truly the author described the planet, and then I ran out of ideas. That was it. Game over. Sigh. I think it was maybe two thirds of a page.
So if no one reads this, I'll be pretty discouraged, but probably will still keep writing from time to time. It's kind of like having a newspaper or magazine column, but without the pressure of having to write X words for every issue� Also without the up side of someone actually paying me for this� So I'll still write, but it'd be really, really, really great if anyone actually read this stuff! 
P.S. I actually wrote this a week or so before I posted it. In that time I discovered statistics Yahoo keeps for my site. I was delighted to see that I do get the occasional visitor!! Yes, that's you!! E-mail me anyway! Part of the idea with these posts is to maybe start a conversation with you on these things...
