When I started blogging back in January 2012, I was under the notion that I would be a great novelist, and talked about all the great writing I was going to do… and somehow never got around to doing, because I was spending most of my days reading other blogs, listening to music and playing solitaire while fantasizing about writing the Great American Novel.
Yeah, I was one of those guys, all talk, no action. And I wondered why, and came up with the reason: I didn’t want to write fiction. For that matter, I barely wanted to read fiction. Seriously, I would buy books or get them out of the library, read a little bit, put the book aside and not get back to it. Mary and I have a joint Kindle library of about 6000 books, most of which are books Mary has read. Of those 6000 books, about 500 are books I bought with the intention of reading and either never started or never finished.
Seemed the only writing I was doing was for my blog. I got involved in several blog hops and looked forward to writing on those days. One of the first blog hops I was involved in was the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge, which was my big impetus for getting into blogging. My first year I took the NATO spelling alphabet (alpha, bravo, Charlie, delta etc.) and used the words associated with each letter as my daily prompts. It was a fun exercise, and I found the challenge of figuring out what to talk about for each word exhiliarating. (How’s that for a $20 word?)
Many times, I’d start with the word and head off in a completely different direction. On S day, when the word was "sierra," I discovered there was a short-lived TV program called Sierra, produced by Jack Webb, who also produced Dragnet, Adam-12, Emergency!, and other shows. So I ended up writing about him. On V day, when the word was "victor," I thought of the movie Victor/Victoria, which was directed by Blake Edwards with music by Henry Mancini, who had worked together on a couple of hundred projects, so I wrote about them.
Talking about Mancini, and Dean Martin (the word for J was "Juliet," and that day I wrote about Juliet Prowse, who had been on Dean’s show a lot in the ’60’s and ’70’s), and Les Paul (who designed the echo chambers at Capitol Records) helped to point me in the direction of writing about music. Writing about Webb, Martin, and Mike Wallace (M’s word is "Mike") reminded me of my fascination with television, which I started writing about. Many of the stories I wrote for the A to Z Challenge that first year were stories about the world when I was growing up and funny things that happened to me on the road.
Those were the directions I took my blog in, and when I started daily blogging (July 1, 2014, and I haven’t missed a day since), those were the things I wrote about, and write about today. And I have no intention of stopping.