NOT my first blog post … really

This is NOT my first blog ever—on my brand new website.

I know it looks like it is, but it’s not.

Really.

It’s my second blog.

Writing the first-ever blog on a newly-designed website, a pristine format where you must line words up all neat and tidy and then launch them forever un-retrievable on their maiden voyage into never-ending cyberspace—that is waaaay too intimidating for me.

So I’ve decided to skip the first blog altogether and go directly to the second. Second isn’t hard. Been there, done that. Ahhh. I can relax and we can just sit down here and have ourselves a chat.

Even more informally than when I wrote newspaper columns a ten-year lifetime ago. Over the course of 25 years of journalism at four different newspapers, I have faced the first-column Boogie Man before. The hardest first column is…well, the first one. As I recall, it was a month before I was able to finally crank one out at The Lebanon Enterprise back in 1979. I’m older and wiser now. Well, older anyway.

Along in here somewhere I should tell you what this blog’s going to be about, but the truth is I don’t really know yet. All my plans for the content of this space would fit inside a girdle and still have enough room for Mahalia Jackson. And that’s Ok. Most blogs evolve over time caterpillar-into-a-butterfly style. Oh, the gurus in the hallowed halls of Blogdom will tell you there are rules about successful blogs. You can’t just write about whatever you feel like writing about, they’ll say. You have to write about what your reader wants to read! (Tough advice to follow when you don’t have any readers yet.) All good blogs have a goal and every word written in them must advance you closer to that goal! Can’t you just feel them flicking their know-it-all ashes all over you?

The Blog Police and I part company on that point. I don’t have a goal. Oh, sure, I would love for you to read my books, but I certainly don’t expect to get there from here. I suspect you showed up today for one of two reasons. 1. You already have read one of my books and you’re curious about the person who wrote it. Or 2. You used to read my column in one of the four newspapers it appeared over the years and you liked it—or hated it!—and either way you want to re-engage.

You’re not going to decide to read one of my books because I stick to a goal—which I don’t tell you is the goal—of writing a blog designed to manipulate you into doing that. You’ll read a Ninie Hammon novel or you won’t. Either way, you’ll decide that for yourself. So that frees me up not to have to twist your arm. I don’t know about you, but I like that arrangement a whole lot better.

Well, would you look at that! Here we are down at the bottom of my blog space. Ok, so the space expands—infinitely! Still, it’s probably a plan for me to shut up now instead of babbling on while you doze off and start drooling or switch to reruns of NCIS. (Random! Show of hands here, ladies. Who thinks Mark Harmon’s white hair just makes him MORE sexy?)

I’ll be back in this same spot next week and we’ll talk some more. Leave your comments and we can actually have a conversation instead of me talking and you listening. Write whatever you want. Why not? I do. Ask any questions you’d like. Over the course of the next few weeks I thought I’d talk a little about the creative process. Where on earth do you get an idea big enough for a novel? How do you set it up, design it, execute the design? Those topics interest me and they’re things I can speak to with some authority. If they interest you, ask some specific questions, come back again and we’ll visit some more. If they don’t, come back anyway and tell me what does interest you.

Now, see how easy that was.