With some trepidation, I have decided to start a web log.  I am not ready to say that I am going to start blogging.  I don’t even like the word blogging.  I don’t think it’s an actual word.  It sounds too much like flogging, which is a word I DO like, but that’s a different topic.  I remember when a student told me she was required to blog for another class, and I had to have her repeat the word several times, then tell me what the hell she was talking about.  Web – log.  I feel more comfortable saying I am starting a web log.  Those are actual words.

My reasons for this web log are what you might expect:  I want to establish a regular writing habit, with readers, even though this fills me with anxiety.  I want to force myself to write, and use my laptop for something more productive than checking Facebook, playing computer games, checking email, posting photos to Facebook–you get the idea.

I am trying to finish a book I started during my (lovely, wonderful, blissful, those were the days) sabbatical in the spring of 2009.  I will post excerpts from the book here, along with other assorted writings.  Most will be nonfiction.  Which gets me to another term I do not particularly care for:  creative nonfiction.  I’m told that’s what I write.  Sigh.

I care a lot about words, and don’t always want to go along with the new meanings they acquire as the world lurches forward.  I resisted getting a computer back in the 80’s, then resisted email, then Facebook.  Now I am hooked on all of them.  So maybe the words blogging and creative nonfiction will become less irritating to me.  I can’t quite embrace them, but I acknowledge their utility.

A note on the word flogging:  it is a good word.  It is onomatopoetic.  It is also a bit humorous, at least to me, as a word, though not as a concept, unless you envision some Monty Pythonesque mode of flogging.  But the word blogging sounds like something inactive, something that has already been flogged into a state of inertia.  Or something dead.

Nevertheless, I am starting a web log.  This is my first entry.  Perhaps I can use the word blog as a verb in the next one.

P.S. The title aliceinwritingland was taken, so I opted for aliceinbloggingland.  Please read ironically.