Why did you write this?

It emerged that he had never read my blog. He said he didn’t know I had a blog. Of course you knew, I said. No, he said, you never told me. Of course I told you! I said. But maybe I really didn’t. Or maybe I did and he forgot. Both possibilities are entirely plausible.

So he read some of it and then looked up at me quizzically and said, Why did you write this?

I’m not sure how to answer that. Does he mean, where did the idea for this particular post come from? Does he mean, who are you writing it for? Does he mean, why would you write this and put it on the internet where anybody can read it?

I don’t know. I don’t know why I wrote it. I just did. I could ask myself the same question about everything I’ve written. Sometimes I do. Why did I write this? But the answer is always the same: I don’t know. I just did.

Or maybe he means, I thought you were writing a book. Maybe he means, it would be nice if you remembered to take out the garbage sometimes instead of writing all this stuff. But now I am making it sound like the question was pointed, when really it was more perplexed, like he’d just found out I was really into crochet and had made a zillion doilies and he just didn’t understand what for.

Well. I am writing a book. I’m writing a new book, in fact. It’s been a long time since I’ve managed to write a new book all the way through. There have been a couple of false starts, but mostly I’ve been revising and rewriting other books, books that already had a beginning and a middle and an end, books I wrote before my second son was born and I stopped sleeping for two years. Rewriting and revising can be done in little chunks. There isn’t (usually) the same need to get into a groove with it. But now I’ve got this whole new world, peopled with new, uh, people (most of ‘em are people, at least)… anyway, the thing is, I need to focus.

So I’m backing away, for a little while, from the blog and facebook and twitter and all these fun places that scatter my focus a bit. I’ll be back when I’ve got a draft out. Thank you for reading along, my lovelies, and if any of these posts made you smile or think yes, that’s just it, that’s how I feel, well then, that’s why I wrote it, that doily was for you.