it's been awhile dear blog hasn't it?

I've become a little slack at a number of things of late not the least of which is writing in my favourite corner of the WWW; that being this little amusing blog of mine.

I don't know why I have these long periods of "whatever" about writing in here! After a week, this blog calls to me like a Siren from across a vast ocean of responsibilities and tasks. I long for it but the thought of tapping out "something" in here that is witty or profound enough can still my answer to her insistent call. It's like I get cement shoes on for a bit and dig in and won't budge! I fear responsibility so much and even a blog won't boss me around!

That being said...writing does win out eventually! Here I am after all :).

I love writing so much, I can't help but do it every day in one form or another. One of the best gifts I ever paid myself was when I was in year 10 at College back in '76. I decided in about term 2 of that year that I probably "should" do typing in year 11 the following year. This meant I had to catch up seeing as I hadn't taken typing as a subject from the pre-requisite year 9 level. It was night classes or nothing!

For two terms, I slugged it out for two and a half hours a week with Miss Obst, a skinny woman about my fathers age who's eyes seem to glint like flint steel whenever she said my name or looked at me! She had it in for me and subsequently my sister after me. Nothing we did could please her. Needless to say, even after all these years, if someone stands over my shoulder while I type...I have a spaz attack and can't type a single legible word for crackers and salt! Honestly? She done fair put the wind up my holes - that woman - when it came to typo's!

Typing was a duty in those days. A skill that was still a left-over '60's pre-requisite for all young ladies to master. Only of course that it made them somewhat more employable before the inevitable marriage and babies gig, society had rigged for our lot. I slogged away at typing hating every minute of each and every second! It was drill work, boring, inconsolably so. That height of modern 70's whiz bang technology, the electric type-writer became like a Mephistopheles to me; a laughing demon of exacting and proficient letter positioning.

I made so many typo's!

I sucked at typing!

I could barely get 50 words per minute with half again the accuracy! But I stolidly plodded onwards, determined as I was to be "employable" eventually.

Secretly, I just hoped some man would come along and marry me forthwith...even at the ripe old age of 16 years and 10 months and I would retire to being the farm girl I'd always been, with romantic kisses for real instead of in girlish fantasies instead!

Life never matches ones fantasies! Of course!

I learned to type.

In about 1995...thereabouts... we (being my ex husband) got our first computer. My kids were young and I was suitably impressed that my husband was trying so hard to keep "up with the times". I'd done some word processing courses as an Adult learner in long periods of unemployment...in order to make me more "employable" (story of my life really..a blog for another day this employability quotient aspect to the back story of my life)!

It didn't have the internet at the time! But I slowly picked up the skill of typing again. It's apparently one of those things that once you learn, your fingers never forget! Given of course that some idiot doesn't decide to change the traditional QWERTY keyboard of course! If that happens I'm in a big big shitty hole! *gasp*

THEN a year or so later, we got dial up internet and my life changed inexorably! Now I had a window to a world of words I could have never dreamed possible. My innate sense of story was unleashed and I WROTE like I'd never written before! My typing flew off the scale in terms of speed and accuracy. I still make mistakes, but whereas Liquid Paper had previously been my best friend in the past, the computer made typo's a relatively non-onerous event! I could edit on the fly and no one be the wiser! :)

What joy! What a pleasure to be able to write like the wind as fast as my brain could fathom the words!

The key to this process was a little mums world forum on a chat website I came across. I learned so much that year from other women around Australia about the intricacies of web talking! Talking in text, in words in pixilated print!

Never have I felt more at home than in this environment. On the screen, inside of it, the ideas in text burgeoning forth like the spraying mist of a Niagrian Brain.

Words! I love them. I always have. I wrote poetry as a teen and stories. I read books voraciously in holidays and I have always enjoyed the art of the great story-tellers like Henry Rider Haggard and Jean M. Auel and M. M. Kaye and so on! I even read James Joyce Ulysses (though I didn't understand it really)!! And Homer's Illiad and Odyessy! I was and am the classic lit snob. I collected ancient books with musty mildewed pages and read the stylistic syntax of Victorian prose and poetry with all the snobbish sweaty palmed drooling capriciousness of a budding scribe herself. Only, I had NO IDEA I was meant to be or wanted to be or love being a "scribe"!

Not until the internet gave me the gift of being able to write and I pressed that old skill of typing into its proper ethical and purposeful use...did I know that I was and am and will be some kind of writer.

It will be here, maybe just this blog or elsewhere on the World Wide Web that my writing will be of any significance. I aspire to a book or a number of novels but in all seriousness, I highly doubt my skill enough to warrant such a claim. I seem to be suited to the transient freedom of eclectic writing in an introspective blog.

Alternatively, it is in the 1000's of conversations I have with people from all walks of life from across this small green planet where my writing is in its highest expression. It's in text - in Instant Messages and in chat screens on my computer. That is where my writing develops a context and a meaning far beyond any Rider Haggard aspirations in literature could take me. It is in the development of relationships via chatting in text that my writing takes flight and my typing speed spikes! I love it!

Go figure!

So what does all this mean?

It means I've been busy! I've been chatting to people from across the globe and typing my little heart out in conversations and emails and creative works. I've also been hard at it at work, writing text for inclusion in brochures, in letters, in flyers, in reports...I have been TYPING and WRITING...daily...and my life is replete with a satisfaction for the journey I can scarcely describe!

My joy in this is insurmountable even while the evidence for it may not be at all.

I so suck at voice though :)

hahahaha

Where have I been?

I've been writing!