So Now I Blog

Blog.

Say it out loud. Go ahead. Blog. It sounds like something that crawled out of a swamp and stuck to the bottom of your shoe. Like a sound effect from a bad cartoon. Like the noise a bullfrog makes after a regrettable meal.

Who decided this? Who sat in a room — presumably in the late nineties, presumably wearing cargo shorts and drinking something with too much caffeine — and said, yes, this is the word. This is what we'll call it when people write things on the internet. Blog.

Not plucking. Not inking. Not word-throwing or page-tossing or literally anything that sounds like it belongs within a hundred miles of the written word. No. Blog. A word so ugly it doesn't even deserve the letters it rode in on.

And now I'm doing it. I am blogging. Me. A writer. A guy who has spent years — years — trying to learn how to put words together in a way that makes people feel something, and the platform I'm standing on named itself after a sound your drain makes when it's clogged.

Fine. Here we are.

Let me back up.

I am a writer. I say that now like it's a fact, the way you'd say you're left-handed or allergic to shellfish. But it took me a long time to say it out loud without looking over my shoulder to see if someone was going to call me on it.

Because here's the thing — I have written over two million words.

Two. Million.

I'll let that land for a second.

Two million words of fiction. Characters I built from nothing. Worlds I furnished down to the coffee mugs and the cracks in the drywall. Dialogue that kept me up past midnight because I could hear them talking and I wasn't allowed to stop until they were done.

Two million words, and I haven't sold a single one.

Not one. Not a short story. Not a chapter. Not a sentence plucked from the pile and handed to the world with a price tag on it. Every word I've written still lives in my files, in my folders, in the space between what I've made and what the world has seen.

And I'm not saying that for sympathy. I'm saying it because it's true, and because the truth of it is the most honest thing I can put on this page. I didn't come to writing because someone told me I was good at it. I came to writing because I couldn't stop doing it.

Now, if you'd told seventeen-year-old me that I'd end up here — sitting at a keyboard, arranging words for a living, calling myself a writer — he would've laughed until his Mountain Dew came out his nose.

Because seventeen-year-old me did not give a rat's turd about English comp.

The term papers. The five-paragraph essays with their thesis statements and their supporting evidence and their conclusions that were just the introduction rewritten in slightly different words. The journaling assignments where you were supposed to write about your feelings like feelings were something you could just line up on a page and make behave.

I didn't care. I didn't see the point. The teacher was talking about topic sentences and I was staring out the window thinking about literally anything else.

God, I wish I'd listened.

Not because they were teaching me how to write — they weren't, not really, not the kind of writing I do now. But because they were teaching me how to think on paper. How to organize the chaos inside your head into something another person could follow. How to build an argument, how to earn a reader's trust, how to move from one idea to the next without losing them in the gap.

I learned all of that the hard way. The two-million-word way. The way where you write something terrible and don't know it's terrible until six months later when you read it back and want to set your laptop on fire.

But here's what I did do.

I read.

I read everything.

If I was in a room and there was something with words on it, I read it. Cereal boxes. Shampoo bottles. The back of the TV Guide my grandmother left on the end table. The pamphlets in the doctor's waiting room about diseases I didn't have and couldn't pronounce. The fine print on the back of a baseball card. The ingredients list on a can of soup — not because I cared about sodium content, but because the words were there and my eyes couldn't leave them alone.

I read novels under my desk in class. I read newspapers at the barbershop. I read magazines in the grocery store checkout line while my mom wrote a check and the cashier made small talk about the weather. I read the dictionary once — not cover to cover, I'm not a psychopath — but I opened it looking for one word and didn't close it for an hour.

(And no, not Reddit. This was before Reddit. This was before the internet decided that reading should come with a comments section and a voting system and a guy named DarkWolf1997 telling you why you're wrong about everything.)

Reading taught me what English comp couldn't. Not the rules of writing — the feel of it. The way a good sentence moves through your chest before your brain catches up. The way a paragraph can hold silence. The way a story can end on a single line and that line can sit in your ribs for days.

I didn't know I was studying. I thought I was just a kid who couldn't stop reading the back of a cereal box.

Turns out, that kid was building something.

So here I am. Two million words deep, zero sold, and now — blogging.

The word still sounds like a plumbing problem. But maybe that's fitting. Maybe that's exactly what this is — unclogging the pipe. Letting the words out into a space where someone other than me might read them.

I don't know what this blog becomes. I don't know if anyone shows up. I don't know if the words I put here matter to anyone but me.

But I know they'll be honest. And I know they'll be mine. And after two million words written in silence, that's enough to start.

Welcome to the blog.

(God, I still hate that word.)

-Tyler