My foray into the blogosphere begins.
Posts here will range from insightful to idiotic, but will always be from my point of view, which is usually oversimplified, naive, and general. Also probably intellectual and a little narcissistic.
Like most arts, there are two parts to writing: ideas and craft, and they affect each other: advances in craft lead to better ideas. Advances in ideas, however, don't necessarily lead to better craft, although they do help the final product.
"If one cannot write, they cannot think." That's pretty cool, even though it puts me at a disadvantage because I'm stronger on the "ideas" side than I am on the "craft" side. But hopefully this blog thing will help me improve.
If you want to write well, you should read good writers. I haven't been doing much reading lately besides the paper, and blogs. Sometimes the SF Chronicle, sometimes Contra Costa Times, and once yesterday, USA TODAY (they had an article on JFK that I thought I should peruse as part of my civic duty to learn history. I was also curious.)
There are some books on a single bookshelf in the room that's not my bedroom. It's mostly theater stuff: plays, books on acting, design textbooks, etc. The other prominent category is therapy: Overcoming Anxiety, OCD handbook, etc. Then there's the outliers: The Guide to Getting it On, "Etiquette for Outlaws" and two Naruto manga (one in Japanese the other in English) BUT! The library is very close to my apartment, which will allow access to countless tomes of varying fictionality and subject matter for me to feast upon. If I ever get off the computer.
There is much more I could say but I want to keep this brief. Maybe someday I'll write something with enough edge to have someone complain about it, but if even at this early stage it is necessary, so be it.
-C
