Well, blogging via WordPress is very strange, so strange that I’m typing this in TextEdit (the Mac version of Notepad) to avoid the distracting bells and whistles of the WordPress user interface. Writing is fickle. It does not adapt readily to a change in process. It’s not like when you start a new job, and everything is so shiny and new that energy, creativity, and enthusiasm abounds. It’s more like going to the toilet in a foreign country.
I remember when I made the transition from longhand to digital writing. I missed the feel of the pencil in between my fingers. I missed scratching out words and scribbling in new ones. I missed flipping through a hard-back notebook in search of a blank page, reading random snips and passages that I had jotted down in fits of inspiration. “It’s over,” I thought. “Writing is dead.” It only took a month before I was playing the keyboard like a concert pianist, and my handwriting began to disintegrate to resemble runes.
But if the move to WordPress is disorienting to me, I can only imagine how completely confused you are, Dear Reader. For when you read a blog, you are not just taking in words, but fonts, colors, spacing, layouts, and other formatting as well — the face for a writer’s voice. And suddenly, my face has morphed from something green and clodgy into something slick and grayscale.
I’ve been steadily porting over content from the old site into WordPress. This morning it took me about 45 minutes to do the entire month of August 2006, which was an eventful, photo-filled month. I don’t remember writing half of this stuff. What a little pip I used to be! Is it strange to say that I’m inspiring myself?
