The Blog

Why So Serious?

I was so looking forward to drinking my coffee this morning I took a huge gulp from my cup before I considered it might be too hot. “Coffee, coffee, coffee – ouch! Oh yeah…”

Most of yesterday passed me by before I realized I never wrote my blog. It was strange really, my forgetting about it. Lots going on, I guess. Preparing for summer and the changes that come with it; kids, travel, what not. On top of this, though, I’ve found that writing my entries is becoming more difficult as I work on other projects – projects that are more serious in nature. I’m a newbie when it comes to the realm of upscale fiction, see. For the last two years I’ve been inside my comfort zone of light women’s literature, where the rules of sentence structure are much more lax – so much easier. F-bombs, zany banter, a gross over usage of exclamation marks and italics, anything goes (for the most part). *sigh*

Upscale is, well, upscale. It’s serious – delicate and pointed, but with just enough poetry to balance out the sparseness of its structure. It has to be compelling. It has to be beautiful. Water for Elephants, Memoirs of a Geisha, stories like this, they sweep you away. They may not necessarily leave you feeling super peppy, but they stay with you, giving you that sigh when you think about it. “Oh, I love that book.” It’s an art, writing in such a way. A skill I’m striving to hone – writing, rewriting, digging, then rewriting again. Just like guitar lessons or Call of Duty, you have to practice in order to be a badass. Can you expect to sleigh every Nazi zombie that crosses your path if you never pick up your AK47? Hardly.

Full circle – this is why my blog has been so uninspired lately. I’m not used to switching roles, going back and forth between a serious voice and a light one. The easy thing to do would be to chill on my blog until I have a better grasp on what I’m doing. But keeping up with this blog is a lot like working out. You skip a few days and before you know it, your motivation is gone. So, it seems what I really need to do is find a way to integrate the two – to find a way to work on my serious voice while remaining dedicated to my lighthearted blog.

Maybe I’ll start writing short stories every day in an upscale tone, but have those stories be about something completely irreverent – like an epic battle between my laundry room and me:

Dawn. This day has been looming. Haunting me. A material ocean churns in the distance, threaded together by sweat, by dirt – by fear. My fear. I’m out numbered, and there’s nothing I can do to change it. There’s only one of me, so many of them. Soldiers shrouded in soiled clothing, mercenaries stained by the verdant grasses of the battlefields. My only armor, my only defense against this army is will…and Oxyclean.

Michelle