Does anybody read these?

Writing...

One post a week?

Not great, but could be worse, I guess.

I am so swamped at work. I have 137 Who's Who nominations this year, and I've fact-checked, written summaries and scanned in photos for 30. Yikes. I see some extra hours in my future in the next week or so, but I'll get it all done. I always do. I could probably hammer them out in two solid days if people would just leave me alone. We'll see...

I'm going through some inner turmoil/internal debate on the journalist vs. writer vs. blogger dynamic. I think the reason this blog doesn't have ads or lots of followers or even frequent posts is because it's just me venting. I write for money at work. I don't know if I'm a journalist anymore. I don't deliberately slant my reporting, but hell, I don't get to report very much anymore. I sure as shit don't feel like Katie Couric on the rare occasions that I do get to interview someone.

Eventually I want to write fun stuff. I've thought about fiction and nonfiction projects, but they both require a lot of time. Lately I haven't even had time to READ books, let alone write them.

I know lots of folks out there are bloggers and they are getting paid for their content, and I'm not sure I hate that. Self-publishing is OK, but there's a lot of badly written shit out there too. Who knows? I'm sure there's people who think I'm no Hemingway.

I'm not. I know that. But I've learned reporting and writing from some of journalism's best. And I've always been a good writer. I was first published when I was in 4th grade. I wrote for the community newspaper and edited my high school paper in high school. In college, I switched to PR, but I still got a lot of pick-up on things that I wrote. I just didn't like the crowd at the campus paper. I just kind of did my own thing, but I'm way too political to be any type of objective journalist.

But realizing your bias is a good thing. Wouldn't it be great if some of the folks on our national news broadcasts did that?

I blog for therapy. I keep thinking of clever, themey blogs, but I always come back to this. It keeps me sane. It lets me vent. It helps me keep in touch with people.

That's not something people pay you for. In fact, I'm sure all the cell phone companies (and my therapist) would say it's the other way around.

posted by Laura at 9:57 PM