So I set up this other, separate blog for the fairly self-explanatory reason found
within the title of this post. You see, dear readers, who are
probably only here to find out news about my books, which is the real
reason you are called 'dear readers' (because you read my
books and only read my
blog
to find out news about my other books you want to read (which, by the
way, thank you for that)), I do not keep a diary. I do not wish to, nor
have I ever. Well, except for one time.
Proof: When I
was eleven years old, I got a flower print diary with gold-edged paper
and a fancy lock and key for my birthday. I was so excited. I had not
asked for such a thing. Before that moment, a fancy lock-and-key diary
with gold-edged paper did not exist in my head as a thing that exists.
But
after that moment, I was so excited. I said, "Whoa....."
(That moment actually went on a lot longer than that but when I added
'uhhhhhhh' to the end of the word it just made it look like I meant to
say "who a uhhhhhhh" only my right thumb went temporarily brain-dead and
forgot to hit the space bar twice; it didn't make sense, so I shortened
it for
less dramatic effect. Implying my right thumb has a
brain does not make sense either but I digress.) Anyway, I said, "Whoa...... coolhowprettyIlovethisI'mgoingtowriteiniteverysingledayofmylifeforforeverthanksmom!"
(In case you're wondering, I actually meant to leave the spaces out on
that part to add
back the dramatic effect I lost earlier and to
show you just how ecstatic eleven-year-old-me was about my new diary.
So don't worry--my right thumb is not slipping in and out of temporary
brain-death.) Anyway, that moment marked the inception of a new hobby
for me. Not creative writing, I was already doing plenty of that since
back in the days before I could read and I thought cursive was just
loopty-loops and somehow people could just understand that each
identical lower-case cursive 'e' meant separate and different things and
that's how people communicated with each other (like visual Morse code
or something) when they had to write to each other instead of talk
because for whatever reason they couldn't use the phone even though it
was the eighties and we all had phones. Anyway, so I was already doing creative writing. And
drawing. Incidentally, I wrote and illustrated my first 'book' when I
was five. It was called 'Sally's Party'--no joke--really original,
huh? And it was about a girl named Sally, who--you'll never guess--had a party, and about
who came to the party and what presents they got her. It was a reaction piece to a straight-to-video kid movie I watched about once a day. In it, the girl had a birthday party but, despite it being one of my favorite movies, I thought they did it all wrong--wrong friends, wrong presents, wrong reactions to opening presents. It was just wrong. So I decided to make it right. I fixed it in my book, 'Sally's Party', and all was then right with the world. I had it bound.
(i.e. My mother stapled it for me. Even though I had wanted to bind it
myself. But my mother deemed the stapler too dangerous for a person who operated under the assumption that the cursive alphabet consisted of only one letter repeated
endlessly--and perhaps rightly so.) Yeah, so I was already into all
that, plus learning every song Gloria Estefan and Celine Dion ever
recorded, as well as creating original dance routines with my sister to
everything by Paula Abdul. Plus I played with my Barbie dolls pretty
much all the time, as in it would not be an exaggeration to say I spent
several hours every day with my dolls in doll-land. Though, technically
that falls under the 'creative writing' hobby because I was telling
stories with them, but I'm digressing again. Anyway, I had all these
creative outlets, but keeping a diary had never crossed my mind as a
viable hobby--it wasn't fantasy-driven; it was just translating
real-life to paper, and to me that just meant 'boring anecdotes and
stuff masquerading as writing and fun-creative-time'. Though I doubt
the word 'anecdotes' was actually in my vocabulary at that point. This
paragraph is way too long so I'm going to start a new one now.
I
vowed to write in my new diary everyday-everyday. But it was one of
those belittling, authoritarian diaries that had the dates printed in
the top left corner so if you missed a day you had to leave a page blank
if you, like me, wanted to stay on track with the actual, real-life
date. As if such a thing matters to an eleven-year-old with no real
problems beyond how she was going to get out of eating the [huge]
portion of lima beans on her otherwise empty dinner plate and still get
the homemade banana pudding that the other five Irvins were already
enjoying because they all ate their dinner at normal, steady paces and
never seemed to question anything put before them, whereas Erin didn't
trust anything green and was convinced it was (and I mean this in the
most literal sense) 'alien food' thus was always the last to leave the
table.
Now, to be fair to me and my borderline OCD
tendencies, my birthday is January 5. So as soon as I got the diary I
was already five days behind for the year of 1996 because my party was
actually on Saturday, the 6th. This was very distressing for me, so I
decided I would try to fill in those days with what I could remember as
being the most significant moments of each. To this day my excuses of
an underdeveloped memory center in my young brain and (probably more
likely) my sheer impatience tempered with laziness fight over which is
the real reason I sucked and still suck at keeping a diary. Though, it
may well be that I just had the experience ruined for me from the get-go. I
couldn't remember much from the five days prior. Nor did I care to
transcribe the things I could.
Finally, I gave up
trying to begin at the beginning and went straight for whatever day it
was by this point. (Because, inevitably, I spent so much time worrying
about the five days that had already gone by that more days passed,
thereby only adding to the distressing and disheartening number of blank
pages.) So by that point it was probably mid-January. Even though it
had been over a week, I was still carrying the blank, flower print,
lock-and-key diary with the gold-edged paper with me everywhere out of a
pathetic and absolutely ineffectual resolve and conviction that a
stroke of genius or inspiration would strike or at least maybe something
interesting enough to transcribe would happen to me or around me and
then I would be Johnny-on-the-spot with my pen poised to chronicle
whatever had happened in my ever-trusty, handy-dandy, locked diary with a
key I had hidden in a separate place I had to dig out before I was
actually ready to write. None of that ever happened.
What
did happen is that one day I forgot my house key. My brother and I
rode the bus home from school and I had a house key on a necklace chain
that I was supposed to keep in my backpack everyday. Except for
whatever reason this day I didn't have it, so we would be locked out
till one of our parents got home from work. Don't worry, nothing bad
happened--we didn't get stolen or hurt; we weren't even scared because
this was
not, as surprising as it may sound, the first time I'd
forgotten the key and we'd been locked out for an afternoon. Some
locked-out days we would just play with the neighbor kids. Some
locked-out days the neighbor kids weren't there and we would jump on
their trampoline anyway. Some days we would spend the time playing 'spy
camp' and wrack our brains trying to figure out a way to break into the
house. (We were never successful with this, just in case you were
wondering.) Actually, forgetting my key must have been an even more
common occurrence than I thought because I now remember my brother and I
getting smart enough to start stashing toys and/or games on the back
deck, in case we were locked out and got bored. (Why we didn't devote
this 'thinking ahead' energy to just remembering to put the damn key in
my backpack, I don't know.) So one of these days, when we didn't play
yard games or various ball games or poker (no joke; we played poker when
we were 10 and 11; we loved poker), I sat on the deck and decided it
was now or never. I threw down the flower print gold-edged paper
gauntlet and gave myself an ultimatum: Write in this diary right now or
you're never going to do it at all and you'll never be
able to do it either, even if you decide you want to later on!
I
pulled it out of my bag. I retrieved my hidden key. I unlocked it and
flipped through the gold-edged pages to that day's date. And this is
what I wrote:
I love Matthew Huff and Alicia still hates me.
That's
it. Nothing else would come. That was simultaneously my first and
last entry in the entire bloody book. And I think it's safe to say that
that was the moment I lost interest in journaling about my day-to-day.
Especially if that sadistic, oppressive diary--so unassuming in its
floral print--was going to insist that I do it everyday. What if
nothing happened one day--like
nothing? What if I stayed home
sick from school and spent all day in bed, recovering from illness?
Really, Fancy Diary? You wanted me to pull my weak and ailing body into a
sitting position, which could have potentially caused further and more rapid
deterioration of my health, just to write, "I'm sick and in the bed
today." Really? Who cares? No one. Not me, not my Erin-less
elementary school class, not my bed, which, by the way, was way more
helpful and purposeful than you were and did not make me do things when
I was sick and generally required nothing more from me than lying and/or
sleeping on it with the occasional jump session thrown in (granted the
parents were unaware and had no intention or immediate reason for coming
into the room to discover me and Bed in cahoots for said jump session,
that is).
So now you know, I've never been a
diary-person (am I the only one who thinks that that hyphen makes it seem
like I'm describing
a person made of diary?). I wrote tons of poetry all through adolescence and beyond, which was always
reflective of my current life quandaries. This was therapeutic and
sort of like a diary in a way, I guess. Kind of. But not really
because it was way more fun writing poems than diary
entries entry.
And
then one day I made my
blog. And I found blogging about nothing
could be quite fun, way back in the beginning, when I got very few hits
and no one was reading because I'd only recently put my first book out
and, as mentioned above, readers of my books are probably the only ones
visiting the blog. But when things got serious book-wise and I was
focusing nearly all my blogging entries on new book updates, I didn't
get to do anymore fun, personal entries about nothing and nonsense. But
nothing and nonsense are still very much a part of my daily life. And
as I've grown as a writer, I've taken an interest in
personal-journaling-made-for-the-public. But I kept thinking it would
confuse new visitors to my site, who just wanted the latest news on my
books, if they saw personal, nonsensical blog posts about nothings and
no ones. Yet the occasional desire to write something like that was
still there. For a while I thought about making a tumblr for
it. But that's just too much trouble. I want everything consolidated
so people get the full Erin Irvin experience [more or less] in one
place [more or less]--that's why I made the page for my music on what was originally supposed to be a book blog. To say, "This is me and I do other stuff besides write books." And that's why I've now
made this second blog. Technically it is separate from "Erin Irvin's Blog" but they are both on blogger so they are still a family--they're sister blogs--nay, twins! Anywho, "Erin Irvin 2" is for when I want to post silly little nothings or tiny
rants or general wonderments.
So all that to say
basically if/when I feel like it, I shall post how/what I feel/think about
something at that moment. This may include
Erin-life stuff, or
Erin-life + Family stuff, or another
epic dream post, or perhaps another essay on
film or
music or
the like. We'll see. We'll all just have to wait and see...
