Post the First: What am I doing here? Who are you people?

My friend Sharon decided to do ten minutes of writing per day and since I have become the least-creative person on earth, I decided to bite her style.  I did get her permission, least of all because a blog I'll probably abandon after a month like nearly every other blog I've started isn't worth losing a friend of 13 years over.  In fact, Sharon and I met via blogging.  We each had "online diaries" over at Diaryland which, I am shocked to discover, still exists.   Go figure.  Her blog was named after her favorite Ben Folds song and mine was named after my favorite animal, the lobster.  We didn't actually meet in person until 2 years ago, but Sharon did once get a call from me in the middle of the night: "I-I-I... think I've been duuuuumped!"  (Spoiler alert: I had been dumped, and was the better for it.  I should have dumped him first.  In fact, I had, two years previous, I just made the mistake of getting back together with him.  Anyway.)

So here I am.  Ten minutes of writing.  Let's talk about some of my creative goals:  I want to make a short film.  In fact, I want to make two short films: one live-action, one animated.  The animated one is my new focus as of this week (I dearly love seeing Oscar-nominated short films in the theater and it always inspires me), largely because I need no one else to do it.  Well, few someones.  I need someone to play an accordion piece for me.  That might lead me to contacting someone I barely know but very much do not like, so we shall see.

I also want to write novels for young adults.  I've been dying to write post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction for, like, forever, but five years ago when I was in a YA fiction class in undergrad (best! Class! Ever!), we had to read The Hunger Games and I saw what the market would become.  I was behind the curve, so that pipe dream has gone up in smoke.

I want to write short stories.  They are my absolute favorite fiction form and the live-action film I want to make is actually based on a story I wrote probably 15 or so years ago for a creative writing class (I've been to a lot of college, but have received degrees from only one).

This blog is a really good way for me to be creative every single day.  It doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't have to even be good.  It just has to be; isn't that the first rule of writing somewhere?  The difference between writers and non-writers is that writers write.  Simple, but complicated.  Sharon's doing hers in Tumblr but I gotta be honest, I'm old (she and I are actually the same age, but she lives in LA and deals with computers for a living so clearly she is hipper than I am) and I feel the same way about Tumblr that I do about Twitter: I kinda get it, but I feel like I'm missing some great chunk of what fuels it because I am definitely not seeing the appeal.

Time's up! I made it through the first ten minutes! Huzzah!