Blog of Lies
There's a guy named James Gurney who writes a great blog. I found it the other day in my search for great blogs to model mine after. There is no chance I can make one like his because he is an artist. He is the author/illustrator of the Dinotopia series of children's books, and he is an artist. And I think James Gurney writes a wonderful blog because he sees like an artist, so he understands instinctively what is too much and what is too little. And he fills his pages with stops and starts, places to land your eyes and rest for a while. It's a talent.
In general, I find blogs tedious, mine included. I really don't care to know everyone's every little thought, and neither do I care to share every little thought in a medium like this. I'd rather talk you to death than write you to death.
Also, being that this is such a public forum (google me and there it is) I can't just share everything, like about the certain someone in my family who has this personality that makes you want to take a 2x4 to his head every time he simpers how he doesn't want to eat too much and then loads his plate like the Himalayas, complaining all the while about how he is eating too much. Or the other dramas that are more poignant than ludicrous. How do you share those things in a forum where everyone can see everything.
And if not that, then it has to be something that can not hurt anyone. Or I could just tell you a story. Story after story after story. Perhaps you wouldn't be able to tell what is real and what was just a story.
I have been considering that. A blog of lies. A fictional blog. One that is disguised as the truth. And sometimes I would just tell the truth. And the reader would have no way of knowing one from the other. This idea holds promise. It is, perhaps, the very best foil for a novelist who has a real life that is just like anyone else's: full of the mundane rhythms of reality, and also its blood and guts and its great, shimmering glories. But I am a woman who doesn't want perfect strangers to know what she ate for dinner, because it is rarely glamorous and rarely thoughtfully prepared, and not at all worth mentioning.
But what if instead I apologized...told you that I was sorry for being away from the blog so long, but I had just been released from the hospital where I had been admitted for food poisoning. One might think it was just from my own negligence, that I poisoned myself with this habit of thoughtless preparation, with my failure to believe that the contents of the tupperware in the fridge was suspect. That indeed it had been in there for weeks and weeks, that in fact no one remembered when it had been prepared, but that I insisted it looked and smelled like perfectly good spaghetti sauce. Considering how little I like to think about food, one might think that I got food poisoning because of budget shopping, buying meat that was "a bit off."
But it wasn't that.
I got food poisoning because of a houseguest. It was my hospitality that nearly killed me. The Obamas recently held their first State Dinner, as you will recall, hosting the Indian Prime Minister and his wife. Well, my stay in the hospital was not due to iffy food preparation and handling, but rather because I am not skeptical enough by nature, and when DH suggested to me that I should think twice about inviting Kannan Chattarji and his entourage to the house for dinner in the days following the State affair, because of Chattarji's heavy dealings in the Indian Mafia, I should have taken him seriously. He is a shrewd and wary man, DH is, and I am a rather gullible and Pollyanna sort.
How could I have known that there would be a plot to kill him that would unfold at my own dinner table? How could I have known that when the madness played out, I would find myself eating from the wrong plate, falling apoplectic to the floor, and spending days near death in Reston Hospital?
In the end, I survived to tell the tale, but so did Chattarji, and so did whomever it was who tried to kill him. DH believes that it has something to do with the Real Housewives bound State Dinner crashers, Michaele and Tareq Salahi, but I do not. I prefer to think it was a plan wrought from internal conflict in the Chattarji hierarcy. One of his own, a climber caught up in a crime of ambition.
These things do happen, and they happen to regular people, just like you and me. When we let down our guard, the forces of evil enter and wreak havoc on our calm and peaceful lives. These moments are the grains that sow into stories. That time that something happened, and it seemed that it was not important, but in the end we discovered it was.
Maybe I won't have to lie to share those with you. Or maybe I will. Either way, if I do it well enough, you will never know.
Peace and, as always, send the muse!
S
In general, I find blogs tedious, mine included. I really don't care to know everyone's every little thought, and neither do I care to share every little thought in a medium like this. I'd rather talk you to death than write you to death.
Also, being that this is such a public forum (google me and there it is) I can't just share everything, like about the certain someone in my family who has this personality that makes you want to take a 2x4 to his head every time he simpers how he doesn't want to eat too much and then loads his plate like the Himalayas, complaining all the while about how he is eating too much. Or the other dramas that are more poignant than ludicrous. How do you share those things in a forum where everyone can see everything.
And if not that, then it has to be something that can not hurt anyone. Or I could just tell you a story. Story after story after story. Perhaps you wouldn't be able to tell what is real and what was just a story.
I have been considering that. A blog of lies. A fictional blog. One that is disguised as the truth. And sometimes I would just tell the truth. And the reader would have no way of knowing one from the other. This idea holds promise. It is, perhaps, the very best foil for a novelist who has a real life that is just like anyone else's: full of the mundane rhythms of reality, and also its blood and guts and its great, shimmering glories. But I am a woman who doesn't want perfect strangers to know what she ate for dinner, because it is rarely glamorous and rarely thoughtfully prepared, and not at all worth mentioning.
But what if instead I apologized...told you that I was sorry for being away from the blog so long, but I had just been released from the hospital where I had been admitted for food poisoning. One might think it was just from my own negligence, that I poisoned myself with this habit of thoughtless preparation, with my failure to believe that the contents of the tupperware in the fridge was suspect. That indeed it had been in there for weeks and weeks, that in fact no one remembered when it had been prepared, but that I insisted it looked and smelled like perfectly good spaghetti sauce. Considering how little I like to think about food, one might think that I got food poisoning because of budget shopping, buying meat that was "a bit off."
But it wasn't that.
I got food poisoning because of a houseguest. It was my hospitality that nearly killed me. The Obamas recently held their first State Dinner, as you will recall, hosting the Indian Prime Minister and his wife. Well, my stay in the hospital was not due to iffy food preparation and handling, but rather because I am not skeptical enough by nature, and when DH suggested to me that I should think twice about inviting Kannan Chattarji and his entourage to the house for dinner in the days following the State affair, because of Chattarji's heavy dealings in the Indian Mafia, I should have taken him seriously. He is a shrewd and wary man, DH is, and I am a rather gullible and Pollyanna sort.
How could I have known that there would be a plot to kill him that would unfold at my own dinner table? How could I have known that when the madness played out, I would find myself eating from the wrong plate, falling apoplectic to the floor, and spending days near death in Reston Hospital?
In the end, I survived to tell the tale, but so did Chattarji, and so did whomever it was who tried to kill him. DH believes that it has something to do with the Real Housewives bound State Dinner crashers, Michaele and Tareq Salahi, but I do not. I prefer to think it was a plan wrought from internal conflict in the Chattarji hierarcy. One of his own, a climber caught up in a crime of ambition.
These things do happen, and they happen to regular people, just like you and me. When we let down our guard, the forces of evil enter and wreak havoc on our calm and peaceful lives. These moments are the grains that sow into stories. That time that something happened, and it seemed that it was not important, but in the end we discovered it was.
Maybe I won't have to lie to share those with you. Or maybe I will. Either way, if I do it well enough, you will never know.
Peace and, as always, send the muse!
S
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