This Blog is about things that have nothing to do with my books or music except sometimes when they do have to do with my books or music but only inadvertently.

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...