I belong to a Facebook group called Flinthills Authors. (I don’t know if I did that embedded link right, but an attempt was made.) In the spirit of group camaraderie, I have joined in on the 52-Week Blogging Challenge. And wouldn’t you know it–Week One has arrived. Yee doggies…

The suggested prompt for Week One is to “shed the stress… Write about why you are stressing about writing.”

Y’all. 

I don’t stress about writing. Four years of undergrad as an English/education major and 2-something years of grad school worked the stress of writing right out of me–not to mention 20+ years of then helping my children brainstorm writing projects throughout their school careers. I fear no word count or page requirement.

That being said, here is what DOES stress me out. My youngest child is currently in college and required to use AP style. I was raised on MLA style. Very rarely did I encounter AP style when I had to write scientific or psychology-based papers, and having watched her now write AP style, I don’t think my AP was what her AP is. 15 year old me cringes when she writes times in lowercase–Mrs. Ziegler would have marked me soundly down -5 pts if I said anything happened at 2:00 pm. 

So times have changed, but my writing style has not. I can adapt to the new guidelines when I am proofreading, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it. I write my blog for enjoyment, so in this lawless land of blogging, I am sticking to what I know. 

I will use 2 spaces after each period. I know this is a bygone habit from the days of manual typewriters, and we still have one in the closet around here somewhere, because you don’t throw anything cool like that out in this household. My husband says going through boxes in the garage around here is like a historical treasure hunt. I didn’t switch to computers until I was in grad school, even though my brother tried to pry me away from my electric typewriter for years prior–he almost had me until I didn’t save after every page and lost a 75 page research paper to a power outage. I still have my electric typewriter, but I haven’t fired it up in years. So my thumb will happily tap dance 2 spaces after each period on this desktop keyboard.

You will pry my Oxford comma out of my cold, dead hands. I have learned restraint over the years, and I will leave a participle dangling at times just so that my readers don’t think I am comma happy and spitting them out like a Gatling gun. Ellipses, too, are a beautiful writing tool…. The pause is like a soft sigh as one’s thoughts float onto the page.

Do I know it is more professional to use “one” instead of “you”? Yep. Does it annoy me to speak professional-ese? Yep. Will I do it? Sure, but not in my own blog. Bite me. If I get wound up on a topic and leap onto my soapbox, all decorum will go out the window. I will start swilling slang like a dog flings slobber.

There might be topics too sacred to touch–I haven’t found them yet for myself personally, but I hold out hope that someday I might stumble upon one and pause before pouring my thoughts out on the page.

So yeah, I think that probably sums up what you can expect from here on out this year. Let’s do this. See ya next week!