Bornfamous

I’ve been spinning my wheels for weeks now, fruitlessly trying to figure out how to make money at blogging. I’ve been searching the web for a solution to the one puzzle no one can solve but me: what should I blog about? All the rest is easy. There’s no mystery about it: you put your ad code in place and you blog. Every day. Simple. Eventually, if you’re good enough at it, people will come and click on the ads. Voila — money.

What I’ve been doing is procrastination, pure and simple. I’m afraid to blog. Why? because I’m afraid that I have nothing to say. I started bornfamous to tell my stories, but I got derailed somewhere along the line. [Update: Now that I think about it, September 11, 2001was when I stopped telling stories and started blogging.] I’m terrified that I’m boring. And let’s face it, this blog and a couple of other I’ve tried have been stultifying for some time. That’s why I’ve had so much trouble making myself blog on a regular basis. If I bore myself, how in HELL can I hope to attract any readers?

Not to mention the embarrassment factor. It’s just plain embarrassing to be so dull. Downright depressing. But what makes my writing so dull? Not being interested in what I’m saying, of course. Not being able to sustain my own interest long enough to write anything worth sharing.

It’s not that I have no interests or that nothing is going on in my life. But I keep assuming that no one else will be interested in reading about it. I feel out of touch with the general blog-reading public because I am older and sicker than the large majority. I don’t like to whine about the aches, the pains, the toxic fragrances and the family disagreements that hold my attention lately.

What else do I have to write about? Buddhism? Yoga? I don’t feel knowledgable enough to write about what I’m learning–it’s so vast. I’m afraid I’ll get it wrong. They say you should write about what you know, and I don’t know this stuff well enough to write publicly about it yet. OTOH, it’s about the journey, right? We don’t have to know it all before we can talk about it, do we?

So it’s back to Morning Pages. I won’t worry about boring anyone but myself. Maybe if I can stop obsessing about making money, and focus instead on the present moment–the whooshing sound of a spray gun from the carwash next door, the familiar, infectious laughter of one of the workers whose face I’ve never seen, the morning quiet between cars on sleepy El Cajon Boulevard–maybe I can find my way back to writing about what interests me again, and my own stories will come back to me.

And then maybe I can finally make some money. It’s so Zen, isn’t it?