corpus callosum

Every now and then I wax nostalgic and peruse past posts on my blog. It's interesting to see how my writing has changed over the years. Now, I don't really fancy myself a writer, but I do love writing. I was talking with a good friend the other night, and I decided that I really like to use both sides of my brain, left and right. Writing lets me do that. To write, you have to know grammar; it's like math for words. You have to know where things go, how to marry quotation marks and punctuation, for example. Writing also requires a certain amount of creativity -- creating metaphors and similes, drawing conclusions and forming ideas where they aren't expressed in an apparent manner.

A couple years ago my blogging habits were a bit different. Rarely did I post pictures. My posts were thick with long paragraphs. Recently I've strayed from that a bit, I guess to make my blog a little more interesting. I don't know if I'd call this pandering but it sort of feels like it. I didn't start blogging to write for an audience and I didn't do it to post pictures, especially ones that others have taken. I started blogging because I like writing and I think that needs to be the reason I continue.

So, just for fun, I thought I'd post links to some of my favorite posts that are nothing but writing -- a few short creative non-fiction essays, if I can be so bold as to call them that. Here they are:

• "Fingerprints": This is my second blog post ever but it's one of my favorites. It's short.


• "my skeptic sight": This one's about Jimmy Eat World, one of my favorite bands.


• "My Fidelity": This one's about my love of record stores and records.

I happen to like reading as much as I like writing (OK, maybe I like reading a little more because it's easier) so I'd like to issue a little challenge: Try doing a post with only writing. No photos, no videos, no music. Use words to describe what you would share as a photo or video or otherwise. Avoid single-sentence paragraphs and avoid making lists (like the one you see above) -- make it long, paragraph upon paragraph. Tell a story. Or make one up. Try learning a few new words to use in this post, or at least use a thesaurus to replace any repetitious words. I'll do one too. If you decide to take this challenge, post a link to this entry and I'll link your post here.