Maybe inspiration will stick this time. I hope. I will also never put the word “procrastination” in a title again. Proleptic, much?

More than a year ago I was inspired to start what became this blog. It took me half a year to get the thing up and running, and more than six months since my last published post, I’m only now getting around to blog post #3 (although in my defense I would like to state that half a dozen or so posts languish in draft state).

I have Real Things I want to write about, but I also feel the need to provide some kind of interim narrative. I’m not sure who I’m writing for — myself, as I think is obvious, but the existence of this blog means that I’m also writing for other people. I suspect that I need to stop worrying about this question of audience, though, because it’s one reason why it’s so hard for me to actually click that not-too-big blue Publish button.

The other reasons have to do with my background. First of all, I write for a living. I do not call myself a writer, however, because I do not have a passion for the activity we call writing. I like to explain things that I’m interested in, which is why I’m willing to call myself a technical writer (or “documentarian” — but more on that term in a later post). And one big set of things that I’m interested in have to do with what I’m paid to write about, namely a lot of stuff that’s related to software development.

So as someone who produces text professionally, I fuss about words. I’m paid to fuss about words. I choose to be thus paid because it appears that I fuss about words compulsively, and with a reasonable degree of what passes for competence in the current state of the English language.

I’m also an academic refugee, who spent decades of her life writing things that required her to produce data from which she derived her conclusions — or at the very least, References that could provide the Authority from which Conclusions Could Be Derived. In other words, I always had to prove my point. Show AND tell. Always be prepared to back up your assertions.

This background contributes to my apparent success as a producer of software documentation — TL;DR version: I’m a highly trained researcher. Ask me to write about something, and I will go find out about it. My work-related reading list is, shall we say, eclectic. (Currently open tabs are related to OAuth, OpenStack, content reuse, lots about API design, Python, Javascript frameworks, asciidoctor, systems analysis, the history of technical writing — and cocktails. Maybe that last one is only indirectly related to work.)

But ask me to write about stuff “just because” I’m interested in it, or care about it? Yes, I set myself up for it, but it’s proving far more daunting than I expected. I have to stop the compulsion to prove every point I want to make, to try to tell The Authoritative Story, to be The Expert.

When I put it like that, I think “ick,” in fact. That’s the antithesis of what I want to do here. I want to tell my stories, give my perspective, honor those who have inspired me but not lay upon them the heavy mantle of Authority. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to have conversations with the folks who eventually find their way here. And even if I’m not lucky in quite that way, I’ll have committed some of my ideas to a more permanent medium than the fitfully firing synapses in my own brain.