Writing About Not Writing

I hereby acknowledge that there are Big Things happening in my life that I cannot write about publicly. Some of them have worried me, some have frustrated me with the mind-numbing slowness of their progression and some have excited me with their possibilities. I will probably never write about the first, I will only write about the second when it is completely resolved and I will write about the third when there is something definitive to share.

Strangely, these three queens of my life have demanded so much of my mental energy that I haven't had any to spare for blogging and little to spare for social interaction. But while the tide of that demand has ebbed somewhat in the last couple of weeks, I find that the public silence I need to keep about these larger issues has blocked the flow of my words altogether in some respect. I can still write fiction, but interactive personal writing has been difficult. I just can't get past what I can't say.

Of course, this is a personal blog written by someone who maintains a public presence for the sake of her career, which means that a wide variety of people might conceivably read it. That calls for a certain level of circumspection. For instance, I love profanity. I really do. I think it has something to do with having been raised in a restrictive religious environment and growing up to become a writer. I have a liberated tongue and a liberated pen, and I'm not afraid to use them. But I also have young people in my life and on my f-lists, and while I'm sure they've heard it all, and while I'm not so sure it's wrong to expose them to the seedy underbelly of the English language, there is an expectation among certain kinds of adults that I will refrain from polluting the ears of younglings with 'bad words'. And while the Great Mother certainly didn't put me on the planet to fulfill the expectations of the linguistically-oppressed, I want the younglings to stay. I like them. (They should ask their parents before they read my fiction, though. Srsly. Caveat emptor, and all that.)

I also recognize that insurance companies look people up online in their never-ending quest to **** people out of coverage (See? There's only one word that goes well in that sentence, and it ain't 'screw'.), that employers keep tabs on their employees' blogs and the blogs of their employees' families and that estranged family members, old enemies, and weirdos (I think those all go in a single category, don't you?) look people up for less than charitable reasons. And there's no such thing as privacy on the Internet, not really. Between the clueless doofuses out there quoting publicly from f-locked posts and the governments crowbarring their way into every corner of cyberspace, nobody with a thimbleful of sense can possibly believe her online presence is safe from inspection. Verily, there are people who love your Facebook account but don't have your best interests at heart.

So, there are three queens in my life who demand my silence, one for good, two for now. There are social conventions about language and young people I chafe against but have heretofore tried to abide by in certain contexts for the sake of my relationships with the young people themselves. And I'm a geek who knows better than to write anything on the Internet that might be used to hurt me later. Taken together, these things have silenced me in ways I don't care for at all, and I haven't entirely decided how to navigate around them and still keep the sort of blog I enjoy reading. But in the weeks and months to come, I'm going to try.

Here's a start.

Fuck.