For the past year-and-a-half or so I’ve been blaming my sporadic, embarrassingly short blog entries on the fact that I have a baby, which means that it’s simply impossible for me to write lengthy, interesting posts on a regular basis. Lately, though, I’ve been reading blogs by a few brand-new moms who are not only keeping up with their blogs admirably, but also writing long, entertaining entries. Dooce, in particular, writes some of the laugh-out-loudest things I’ve read on the web. I think my blog envy could develop into an all-out inferiority complex.

I know, actually, what the problem with my writing is (besides laziness, I mean). It’s that I don’t like to take risks. I like to have control, or at least the illusion of it, at all times. I have never been able just to let go. This same inability, or unwillingness, is the reason that I was never able to dive or to turn a cartwheel. I can’t face that split second when your feet leave the ground and you’re just … out there.

Like so many bloggers, I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I’ve started and abandoned countless projects–novels, short stories, poems, journals. I usually start out with a solid idea and the first little bit comes to me fairly easily. Then I reach the point where I know I should turn myself over to it and just let the words flow, but I can’t. I worry too much about word choice and grammar and paragraph length and not nearly enough about plotlines and character development. I over-analyze my writing, the actual writing, until my story dies a slow, painful death.

I came to the conclusion several years ago that I’m much better suited to editing than to writing, which is why when jobs were being doled out at Mosaic Minds I volunteered to do editing and lots of it. I have almost no writing responsibilities (I do have a regular column, but it’s a recipe column, which limits my actual writing to just a paragraph here and there). For the most part, I’m satisfied with that, but I do have to admit that I’d like to see my name a little more often in article headers. As important, and satisfying, even, as editing is, it doesn’t come with a lot of glory.

I did take a bit of a plunge for the upcoming issue and wrote a short fiction piece. It was agonizing. I don’t know how I’d ever be able to survive writing a whole novel.