How to Start a Blog

Spend too much time at your keyboard not writing. Worry that someday they will discover the rays emanating from the bottom of your lap top are toxic. Read other people's blogs. Join JacketFlap. Decide all the other writers in the world know each other. Feel jealous. Realize you were not cool in high school and you will never be cool amongst people who write about high school either.

Start ten blogs. Delete them all. Worry that Blogger staff are laughing at you.

Create a livejournal account. Leave it inactive when you are unable to figure out how to view your own profile. Realize someday your children will be as frustrated with you about technology as you are by the fact that your father still calls a remote control a "clicker."

Find yourself blogging in your head. Find yourself hilarious.

Begin.

Hear the baby crying.

Delete the blog.

Begin again a different day.

Wonder just who (besides your mother) you expect to read this blog. Delete the blog again.

Begin again months later. Think it looks dumb to only have a few posts. Realize if you would stop deleting your blog you'd have more than a few posts.

Have a revelation while in the shower about exactly what you want the blog to be: a kind of online version of the meeting rug in your classroom. And with that, you know exactly what kind of blog you want to have, and what you want to say.

Vow to try it for six months and see how it goes.

Begin.