Live and Learn indeed

I’ve known my wife now for 15 years. One of the things I love about her is that she is a talented story teller and writer. Whether it’s a fictional story or a story about a funny thing that happened to her that day, I think she has a knack for unfolding a story in a funny and entertaining way. She tells me I’m biased, but I’m not the only one to tell her that she should be writing for a living. She also has a pretty healthy ego and confidence about herself, but when it comes to her writing she just refuses to put herself out there in any real way. I’m not sure if it’s the fear of rejection or whether she really doesn’t have confidence in her work, but she will only share her work with a few people and some of her writing she won’t even share with me.

I’ve tried for years to convince her that the Internet is a good place for her to familiarize herself with sharing her work in a semi-controlled way. Several years ago, I set up a completely anonymous website for her to post her stories and get comments and feedback from people. No one would know it was her work, but she could get some valuable insight into whether her stuff is any good beyond what her loving husband says. As blogs, podcasts, and social media sites have come along, I’ve tried again and again without much luck to convince her to give it a shot and go “online”.

The closest I got was for her to agree to record an audio version of one of her books and let me serialize it on a podcast, but in the end she backed out when we started discussing technical details like what to call the podcast. For someone who will tell every stranger we meet on the street our life story, she claims she doesn’t want to share anything about herself online. She refuses to sign up for Facebook, saying that if she wanted to connect with someone she knew, she’d just call them (yes, honey, I know). Even dismissing the whole writing angle though, I just think it would be cool if I could send her messages on Twitter.

So, the other day when my lovely wife walked into my office and announced, “I want you to set me up with a blog,” I think you can imagine just how long it took me to recover and pick my jaw up from the floor. Even more shocking was that she passed the “what do you want to call it” seriousness test. So, I helped her create a WordPress.com account and configure her very first blog.

I can’t promise you’ll get to see the results of her great American novel, but she’s already posted a couple of stories. One is the background story for the name of the blog and the other is her take on a funny incident that happened last night. Before I sent you off to read it, let me give you something to compare it against. My post to Twitter regarding the incident last night was, “just spent 20 minutes chasing a small bird around the house. Caught him with a towel over the cat litter box and let him go outside.” Now, keep in mind that Twitter purposely limits messages to 140 characters (why it’s called microblogging) and go read my wife’s tale of the same incident. See if you can’t see what I see.