There were a couple of links to articles on the Blogger homepage about people who blog and how drekkie the blogs are. I first started blogging because I read an article in the Washington Post about blogging and thought how fun - online journal. Writing is my hobby and I saw it as one more way for me to write.

The blog for me is like a mini journal. I have another journal that I write in and then this is my online journal. There are thoughts that I've written in my personal journal that I never want anybody else to read. Sometimes I take thoughts from that journal and post them here, but I never take things I write here and put them in my personal journal.

I got my first fanmail from someone on Sunday who had read my blog. That was shocking because it's someone I don't even know and I'm like my blog is so boring, I can't believe someone read it. But at the same time, how cool is that! There's someone out there who read my ramblings and I guess liked them enough and was kind enough to send me an email.

As someone who writes for a hobby, you have to live with the fact that probably no one outside your own personal circle of close friends and people who you might in writing class or writing group with, will ever read your writing. So if no one reads my blog I'm used to it But it's fun to think that other people that I don't know and will probably never meet, have read my blog and enjoyed what they found here.

It's sort of like what I heard about in a sermon about praying. You pray to reaffirm your relationship to the person you're praying to. God doesn't need you to pray to him, you yourself need to pray to him. It's an odd concept I know. In the movie Shadowlands, a student of CS Lewis tells him "we read to feel we're not alone." I think writing for me is the same; I write to feel I'm not alone. When I write about my characters, especially the ones that are so unlike me, it gives me comfort to know that their experiences are the same as mine. Maybe I get that from my acting training. In acting, you have to have to find something from your own life sometimes to get the emotion right for the character you're playing. In writing, I do the same thing.

Still, it's sort of weird to know that other people might be reading my blog but comforting at the same time, especially when someone tells me they enjoyed it. I'm hoping that means we're all the same type of human being, just in different bodies, from different cultures and with very different experiences.