“An Open Letter to De Codified” or “Writer s Un Blocked”

Dear Cody (and tacitly, other interested parties and sports fans):

I know I’ve been remiss about posting these last few, erhm, weeks, and when I have posted, the entries have been a little less than substantial.  There are several reasons for this, of course.  For one, I have to go to Panera or the public library for secure (funny, huh?) internet access.  The other and probably most significant reason that I haven’t been regularly posting is that I finally have a story worth writing.  That is to say, I’m taking a hiatus from the Writer’s Block.

Last summer, KCMP asked me over a Sam Adams why I closing out the successful tointerpellate.blogspot.com.  After all, I had amassed such a great and interested readership of friends and friends of friends.  I told her it was because I had committed to blogging for a year and the year was now up.  “Bullshit.  Why are you really closing out your blog?”  The real reason was, and I think you’ll understand what I mean, that blogging had become to easy.  It was too easy to write an entry, knowing exactly who my audience was and all of that.  I needed to do something more challenging.

That fall, I finished up my coursework at OU.  I didn’t expect it to be as trying as it was, but shit happens, you know?  And after grad school happened, the Writer’s Block happened.  Writer’s Block, as you well know, is something of a misnomer.  It’s more like a paralysis.  For me, it was as though my thoughts were out of sync with my fingers.  It was an issue of rhythm–of feeling the words as I write them, and of feeling them again as I reread my work.

So.  Instead of growing more and more frustrated, I started blogging again, this blog, because, hell, at least I was writing something new.  In the meantime, I was revising old drafts and sending them off for publication.  (Nothing exciting on that front, but you’ll be the first to know when it happens, or rather, second after my mom).

And then, when the summer happened, I started writing letters to Michael.  (Tall J has asked me what I write about, and I told him, nothing really, I just try to be as entertaining as possible.  Like, how I utilized the public transportation of OKC for one day, answered the door one morning to several admiring fans of Sam’s who had got the wrong address, heard scandalous rumors about a certain individual who had secret boyfriends in high school, and tried to convince everyone at the SKKY Bar one night that it would be really cool if the Spice Girls reunited to do a cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time after Time.”)

Maybe it was because I was both typing AND writing, but I became Writer’s Unblocked around mid-August.  Happy birthday to me!  Unfortunately, my poor blog has suffered and, as a result, your blog-loving appetite has hardly been sated.  I’ll post again, I swear.  I promise I won’t close down this blog as I did the other back in July.  All the same, don’t count on anything spectacular anytime soon.  I have a story to finish and an editor to find.

Much love, always, and I’m looking forward to seeing you this weekend!  (Fox and Hound?  Something low-key?  I’m totally game for driving down to Norman this weekend since they’re playing an away game on Saturday.)

Misty Moo