a mental call to arms!

a good friend from home happens to also be a rabid fan of my blog (she enjoys the blog, but also has rabies). she recruited me to be her first online student of creative writing. this interested me immediately, as i am doing my best to become a better writer, and also because she claims to want to 'make out' with my blogs. aside from foaming at the mouth and fornicating with words, she is a masterful writer and i value her opinion on my pieces greatly.

now that i know i am to be sharing my thoughts with not only the entire internet, but also a group of 4-6 people, i am suddenly nervous. since i am far away from this potential ensemble of nay-sayers, they will have to read my works without my piercing glare to contend with. that means i will have to work four times as hard to impress them, since they wont have the pleasure of listening to my pleasant baritone recite whatever i have written for the week.

i dont think anyone who reads this blog regularly cares that i might not use punctuation properly, capitalize anything, or know what an 'adverb' is, but the eyes of writing's elite are more discerning. to really wow this new audience, i will have to use archaic participles and analogies that evoke childhood reprimands. i will cover subjects so ethereal and words so obscure that the layperson will need not only a dictionary but a brontothesaurus (look it up, layperson, it's like a mega-thesaurus, only bigger and more dangerous). this is my time to really show off my ability to show off.

should i fall short of these lofty goals, i will still have options open to me. i can reenlist in the army for 20 more years as an act of contrition, i can take up self-flagellation, or i can do the unthinkable: keep writing in hopes of slowly getting better. i know working at something until you reach a state of arguable profiency is unamerican, but i figure that is offset by the hard work i am willing to put into this.