Incredibly Mediocre, Oddly Sincere

There are days when if you stare at the blank page long enough, it stares back at you. At other times, the words just don't stop flowing.  Those are the days when the world fits together just right. Every sentence leads into the next with all the smoothness of a butter knife gliding smoothly across the perfectly browned slice of toast. Why can't I have more days like this?  The most obvious answer could be that no human ever functions at 100% at every single point in their life. Which is a perfectly valid answer, of course. And yet it's never really done it for me, the perfectionist that I am.  It's an odd combination, to be fair - being both a creator and a perfectionist. And I know many who would agree with me on this. Though we can comprehend and even love the imperfections in the creations of others, our own imperfections seem like fatal flaws to us. We look at our writing and see the clunky combinations that make us despair of ever being as good as our favorite aut...

 As it turns out, simply starting is a lot less simple than I'd realized. Who knew? For several weeks, I stared at my laptop with a sense of dread. The sheer idea of having to open it up to write something truly inspiring had me stuck before I could even start. I wanted to write something that would be witty and imaginative. Creating pieces of content that would have the elite readership adjust their glasses as they memorized quotes to deftly introduce in conversation at their next charity gala. An article that wouldn't feel out of place in the New Yorker, shared obsessively on several social media platforms.  It does feel like a moral has snuck in here, past my keen eyes. So I decided to go back to the basics - to think about what I like to write. This isn't a difficult question - I know exactly where my allegiances lie. I love writing scary stories. Horror blends beautifully with several other genres, giving us books, movies, and television shows that are truly terrifying...

Returning to blogging is a bit like riding a cycle after a long time. The strange wobble that runs through the cycle as you begin pedaling. The familiar illusion of control as you cruise for a good ten seconds. The terrifying realization that you're absolutely not "killing this". The inevitable crash. The sad attempt at trying to get back up with whatever dignity you can muster, while two people down the street pretend they didn't just see you take a tumble.  Given that this could also double as a terrible metaphor for adulthood, it's possible I haven't missed much.  I remember my first blog like a distant, vaguely repressed memory. In a rare fit of grandiose self-belief, I had called it "What Was I Thinking?" To be honest, I did have an impressive range. I covered everything from teenage angst to artsy-fartsy to possibly decent. I just knew , with a misplaced sense of great certainty, that the sleeping author within me would soon awaken and I would ...