Barbara J. Hamby

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Blogging Along

Reading other people’s blogs, especially writers’ blogs, has filled my last couple of hours. The more I read, the more I’m convinced you have to be at least a little crazy to be a writer. You have to be even more crazy to want to be widely published and read and jump through all the hoops necessary to achieve those goals.

There have been times when I’ve regretted that I didn’t do more writing in the early part of my life, so that I would be more experienced and more publishable by now. I no longer feel that way. I’m happy to write a blog, and verses/poems and maybe an occasional non-fiction book, such as the memoirs I’m working on now.

Today, while working on the story of my second marriage, I had to pick the brains of my two children for family history I couldn’t recall. My son protested, “You didn’t tell me there’d be a quiz in forty years.” My daughter, ten years older than he, helped me remember what I needed.

I seem to be driven to write something for this blog every day that I’m at home. Doing so gives me writing practice and more discipline than I had in the past when I tried to write a journal. I’m sure that it’s not always of great interest to a wide audience, but now and then, someone reads something that intrigues them and lets me know about it. That’s always fun.

Do you wonder, as I do, how blogging and bloggers will be regarded by historians? There is such a huge variety of people practicing this, dare I say, art. Some blogs are educational, some are drivel, and many are pretty trivial. Maybe blogs, and not email--that’s more temporary--will be the instruments of history to tell our descendants what life was like for us. Better blogs than television sit-coms.