A Blog About Blogging.

Blogging started out as people creating online journals.  And as such, it was seen as the ultimate in vanity publishing where you get to write about you and publish it yourself.  Because of that fact, blogs were looked down upon by those in publishing including authors and journalists who were, many times, writing about their own personal experiences or following stories that they, personally, found compelling.  

I'm all for it.  Get personal.  Tell your story or tell the story from your personal perspective.  It's important for us all to hear and read about the world around us from inside someone else's mind and viewpoint.  That's why interviews and memoirs are so compelling.  We're curious about what goes on in someone else's life, relationships and head because it makes us feel less alone.

It creates connection.  And we all need to connect especially now when we never gather around campfires, rarely see our neighbors or even chat around the water-coolers to listen and tell our stories.

I am a writer.  And I am an artist.  So I started my first blog almost 10 years ago to try to bring these two areas of my life together, to put myself out there in the newer online world hoping to connect with other like-minded people by telling my own stories of life along my creative road. 

I don't know if I've succeeded.  I know I have readers out there but blog comments have been blown to the side of the internet highway by the continuing growth of social media outlets.  It's so much easier to 'like' or 'heart' or 'favorite' on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.  And, as I've written about here before, I'm just as distracted by that as anyone else. 

But I still blog.  And I think I'd still blog even if there were no readers out there.  Why?

Because I love to write.  I've written since I could hold a pencil, even if it was scribbles all over my brother's notebook.  And maybe, I'm still doing the same thing.  Scribbling.  Just for the joy of moving my hands over a keyboard and seeing words appear on a page.  

It's like magic.   And like magic, it creates a spell around us all.  The spell of stories.

I love stories.  I read and listen and watch stories everyday.  And I especially love to read and listen and write stories about other artists.  I love to find out how they got started, what inspires them, where they create and who helped them along the way to becoming creators.

I've been interviewing artists and creative people for awhile now.  Artists who live and create in my hometown of Portland, Oregon, authors from around the country and business people who have created their own unique products.  

I learn so much about courage and determination and inspiration, and mostly, about love.  Because, I think creating, art or stories or cakes or a garden, is really a story about love.   

Here are links to my older blogs:
Susan's Art & Words  http://sculpturepdx.blogspot.com/
Voices of Living Creatively http://voicesoflivingcreatively.blogspot.com/

I've also written on these blogs:  
Eric Maisel's Creativity Central  http://ericmaisel.blogspot.com/
Portland Open Studios Blog  https://portlandopenstudios.wordpress.com/2010/03/
Artist Studio Tours of Washington County   http://artiststudiotoursofwashingtoncounty.blogspot.com/