In Marigolds and Mountains I am going to try to set some goals for writing.
First, I must talk about Facebook.
About two years ago a friend taught me how to use Facebook which I denounced at every chance thinking it was the downfall of privacy, which it is, but more on that later. At first it was too much fun too miss, hanging out with my high school friends again, laughing, feeling fifteen again, taking back to back long haul trips to re-create those times again. Again and again and again.
I even became a travel writer and completed one of my life goals, to get a press badge and publish. After fifty publications duly "Facebooked" I was becoming exactly the kind of writer I hate, self-promoting, whose news faded the moment it was in print, all about where they've been while you couldn't be there.
I found I wanted more and more real-life, less and less virtual festivals, birthday parties and baby showers, acquisitions and outrages. I felt entangled in the old idea of loyalty, responsibility, accuracy and read everything everyone posted. This wasn't real loyalty, responsibility and accuracy, it was the opposite. Anyone could post anything in a constant cycle of "look at me", it was wearing me out! Sharing was becoming the opposite of sharing, it was becoming instantaneous and split second gratification.
So, repeatedly, I deactivated my account.
Then curiosity killed the Cat.
I opened that Pandora's box again.
That journalist part of me had to find out the W's : who, what, where, when, why... and how, which, but was met with alot of "WTF", "LOL", "BRB", acronimous acronyms, emoticons instead of emotions. I felt like I had a disorder of the highest order, a compounded nostalgia, both real-life and virtual.
Still, like an old yearbook, at times, photos and "dot, dot dot" those funny elliptical descriptions we used to use in high school to describe friends and their secrets, could be a comfort.
But from what? This was bordering on irreality. Deactivate! Deactivate!
So, at this point I should interject some background and purpose, a kind of self-portrait, to this blog before it also becomes an empty slate of tactic to procrastinate and avoid reality again! I am a true Gemini, Gemini-rising, my astrological twins are my brother and my husband, which makes me blessed and cursed with multi-perspectivism. Add to this many years of interpreting, translating, writing and teaching in several languages and at times you have a person with VERY scattered energies.
So I am trying to reel it in here and become a "just the facts" ma'am.
I live in Milan. I am a mother of one, very loving and talented child. I am wife to one very loving and talented, sometimes maverick, Italian man. More about this later.
I am writing this blog to set five goals.
First goal : to write with confidence without having to back edit every few words as I have just done several times now.
Second goal : to write with a potent voice for my life experiences which has taken me to live nearly half of my life outside my own country, culture and language.
Third goal : to write for readers who like what I write.
Fourth goal : to write well and with style without feeling too constrained to always use the third person, vast resources and vocabulary, a certain rhetoric, ellipsis and run on sentences.
Fifth goal : to write so others can write because there is nothing I like better than a good story.
I'll end with a wish: to muster the inspiration to face books and blank pages and fill them with great stories.
