A Blogging 101 assignment. Can I say I didn’t start to blog for the readers but for me, the writer. This is sort of a King Midas in the bulrushes kind of deal.

My dad was one of the real pulp fiction writers. One of my earliest memories is turning over in bed as a child and hearing the typewriter banging and clanging. When he was on deadline, he would work through the night. We always read and wrote in my house. And Daddy always ripped everything I wrote to shreds. Not that I always minded. The first time I wrote a business memo after he died, I was lost.   He became president of the NYC chapter of MWA. I used to take him to the Edgars. There was an Ellery Queen/Alfred Hitchcock party beforehand. I was always the non-writer. The evening was almost always an “enough about me, how about you? How did you like my latest book?” At the last one we went to months before he died, he overheard someone questioning me yet again about my writing. He knew I always wrote. So why wasn’t I doing something with it? Well, I told him I felt I couldn’t while he was still alive. His gift to me and it was huge, he told me not to wait, that I had to do it. Well, he’s been dead 11 years and I still haven’t. No, Daddy is not my dream reader, far from it.

I need to write. It makes my life better. Is my dream reader me? No, as Daddy would have told you, I am the critical reader. Yes, I live to read as well. I lose my equilibrium. Writing is a close second. I don’t do it as much anymore for me. Email sort of saps me.

So again, I am doing this blog to save me. If you read my About, it’s about my confrontation with disease and mortality.

Back to dream reader…uh, someone who reads? Well, someone who might get me and where I am coming from (and where I need to get to) I haven’t given much thought to a reader. It’s about the writing also known as venting. It’s one of the reasons I haven’t announced to my small world that I am doing this. Some people know I have started but I haven’t told them where to look yet. Dream reader – someone who will go along for the ride.