It was around this time that I managed to formulate what I dislike about short stories, that is, that they’re short. I invest in the world I’m reading into. I read to grow attached to the characters, to explore their world, inner and outer. I want to know more, sit by the fire with them and hear story after story. Short stories leave me cold because just as I am beginning to grow attached, just as I begin to feel the words fold over my head and that warm, welcome sense of vanishing entirely from this world into another begins to take hold — BOOM. It’s over and that world is closed to me. It’s like an unsatisfactory one night stand versus something that at least suggests future possibilities.

But I digress. The point I wanted to make about Robin Hobb is that she detests blogging as a distraction from writing: you can read her whole rant here. Indeed, it is called Rant. She pleads with writers to write, rather than to expend their energy in blogging, which she sees as a poor substitute for actually working on whatever project is at hand.

I have some sympathy with her point. When I was parenting 70 million hours out of every twenty-four, blogging that life was an utter relief — and provided me with an outlet for writing that I found undemanding and nonjudgmental. I had no word-count to reach, no great novel to expel. It was in and of itself, a perfect end. Now that I am parenting a more sensible twenty hours a day, I am writing again — and blogging markedly less. There is a terrible trick that blogging plays on me which is that, when I blog, I feel as if I have actually done my writing for the day and that now I’m off the hook, when of course, I’m not. But something in my head goes BING! and I suddenly find myself wandering off to get coffee in a smug haze of self-congratulatory achievement.

Yet I admire — and am amazed by — those writers who not only write every day but blog. And twitter. Lots. I honestly don’t know how they manage it. I am thinking of people like Elana Johnson, Johanna Harness, Julie Butcher, Inkygirl and AuthoressAnon and oh, I don’t know. A hundred others. These writers are good, working writers AND they manage wonderful web-presences and lively correspondence with others. Well, wow, is all I’m saying.

Perhaps the days of writing in a Parisian garret, alone with oneself and the scratch of pen on paper, are truly over.  The sticky, connecting, enticing world-wide web invites writing — or at least,  writers — into a lively, social whirl, warm, supportive and encouraging. A cocktail party of words and wordsmiths.

Yet, in the end, we write alone, fingers on keys, a hand moving pen across paper. Writing at its very core is the teasing out of woolly thought into long, smooth yarns — and too much distraction tangles the emerging thread. I am still working to find the balance in my own pen-in-hand life between garret skritching and virtual society.

Of course, all of that is here, in me. My road stretches back and is paved with those memories, those feelings, those behaviors, those choices. But the wonderful thing about roads is that as long as you do put one foot in front of the other, you get places. The scenery changes. You wake up and it’s warmer or colder or  greener or grayer. This too shall pass.

And so it is, that children grow and PhDs are finished, jobs are found, moves are moved and the road wends on. Today I am forty and some weeks old, physically somewhat fitter and lighter, remarkably lighter of heart and mind. After about a million years of good intentions and a lot of avoidance, I finished writing a book. I’ve even started the next (although I am firmly in the phase of loathing it and thinking I am a terrible writer). I am looking forward and believing that good things are not only coming, but here. And that I have within me a fresh and renewed sense that I can make it so, that I am not simply the prop on which other lives rest but the prop of my own life. That there is room in these daily hours for me and for them, that I can choose to go forward, whatever the road behind me is, and plant flowers along the way (a la Miss Rumphius, who made the world a better place).

I’m still making it up as I go along, but it doesn’t seem quite so foggy. See, somehow in the last few months, I suddenly stood up to myself and said, if you want to do something, start now. Your time here is not infinite and you are wasting it. And so almost three years after I wrote this post, I am doing it. I call myself a writer. I write. This is what I do. My book is being read by a decent editor. I am done avoiding what I want because I’m scared to want it, fail at it, whatever. I am way, way more scared of spending my whole life being scared.

I am building my own website right now (despite my stunning ignorance of all things html-ish). It will — I hope — be a sort of professional home, but I will blog there and post bits of writing and stuff of that sort. I think I’m not only shutting down these other blogs, but (after copying the contents) deleting them. Although don’t hold your breath because it’ll take me a while to do all the cutting and pasting necessary. It’s time for me to move on, not in baby steps, but in huge great flying leaps. Come visit me at my new home here: francescaamendolia.com. Give me a shout out and let me know you’re still out there. And thanks for being with me all these years, on and off, along this road.

Then the children grew a little older, Ed stopped being a student, we moved and I realized that I needed to identify as ‘mother’ like I needed a hole in the head. What I needed was to find out where the non-mother, non-wife I had got to in what had become my life.

I needed a fresh start (a fresh hell, as Dorothy Parker once said). This is it.

But I wonder if this blogging phenomenon is yet another response to the collapse of real community? Are we essentially feeling unheard, or if not unheard exactly, since I expect that many of us are also unloading our opinions on family and friends and innocent passers-by, then unregarded. As an American living in the United States who believes in oh, for example: free birth control, socialized medicine, fair state pensions, a living wage, education for all, legal abortions, the clear and distinct separation of church and state, closing the gender gap in all sorts of ways, slow food, the choice to stay at home with your children if you want to for more than 42 days without losing your job, getting out of Iraq, paying our dues to the UN, funding AIDS research, public television and the national parks, meeting emissions standards and protecting a free press who occasionally use a beautiful and useful word I have to use a dictionary to understand — I often feel like I’m shouting into the abyss. Or into my pillow. So maybe me and the rest of the million bloggers there are out there blogging up the works are trailing our voices through the abyss like fishing lines, hoping to catch an ear.

I read today about how the editors of a literary encyclopedia were moaning because women’s entries were too domestic. Persephone Books (www.persephonebooks.co.uk) joined in the fray to point out that Virginia Woolf had exhorted women to write all their stories — no matter how banal or trivial they might seem. To write all stories.

And so here is one story. My story. The story of a mother — too young to be old and too old to be young. Struggling to be a good mother and struggling not to run away screaming, to do the lambada in a short red dress with an unsuitable man. Too much to do to ever find time to write and too much to write not to find time for it.