Charlotte’s Babblings

I really like the post Get Out of the Zone from James Brausch today.  It makes me smile. I feel all warm and fuzzy. My whole week is made. It flows in the vein of his practical and somewhat iconoclastic philosophy of the 2%.  The title  has a mildly cute twist on a psychobabble clichè.  But that’s not the only reason I should feel this way about that article. It makes clear to me what my true passion is….writing! And well it should.  I wrote it.  An then there’s the article on Weight Loss Dude about how your keyboard makes you fat.  I really like that one too, for the same reason.

 Unfortunately, I’m only batting 666 (how appropriate is that!) as I didn’t make the Costa Rica HQ blog. No surprise there–those articles had no actual connection to my experience.  I must not have used enough imagination. No excuses though. I can write about alien planets, but nobody will ever follow my characters footsteps and prove me wrong. I take that back–I’ve read Podkayne of Mars, who dies on Venus in a plantation explosion…they didn’t know about Venus back in the 50s, so the story was based on what they did know, and now that story is just a fantasy.   I don’t know beans about Costa Rica, except for what I read online, and so much of what I read is real estate and vacation hype.  I just didn’t do enough research.

 I’m one of hundreds (about 4 hundreds if I’ve read correctly) of Brausch’s minions (okay, he calls us interns), and the writing was work for hire–not the first ghostwriting gig I ever had, nor the best-paying one. But what a nice surprise to find it today on my late trek through the afternoon–even better than the monetary award in my paypal account, which was also much appreciated.  Many of the posts on his blogs are written by interns, some closer to his style and voice, others not so much. I feel very good that some other minion thought the articles were good enough to post. I could live for the feeling of someone else publishing my work.

What I learned from that task was that I could write a heck of a lot more than what I am doing–at least if I didn’t do so many other things like intern tasks–and it does not matter that I didn’t know much of anything about the topics. I can research them and come up with something that will work. I can see that it does make a difference if I can relate the topic to my own experience, and I do know how to do that from writing fiction. Time to get out of the blog zone and into my writing.