From nobody to writer in 3 simple steps

I'm nobody special. Nobody whose thoughts merit anybody else's attention, let alone the attention of complete strangers.

No, I'm just your average twenty-something, a number of years into marriage (I started early), a couple years into parenthood (also begun quite early), a couple years out of graduation from a four-year liberal arts institution, in possession of an expensive, yet-to-be-paid-for and yet-to-be-utilized humanities degree, and the kind of person who, when he dreams those late-night impossible dreams, the kind of dreams others might have of being a rockstar, moviestar, sportstar or some other kind of star, dreams of being a writer (though he doesn't write anything and though he apparently has no talent having never seen a run-on sentence he didn't like) or a professor (though he has nothing special to profess about) or some other kind of person who is paid for the privilege of interacting with books (though not in the way he currently does which is simply torture: buying and selling them all day, which is to say, being constantly tempted, even seduced, by the delights they hide between their covers but all the while forced into treating them primarily as ten-digit numbers not the soul-filled, life-changing, foundation-of-the-world-shaking things that they really are).

So where does a person like myself turn to begin becoming that dreamed-of future self? Where else but the hyper-democratic internet and its ever burgeoning blogosphere. Because I may be nobody special, but blogs are just made to make you feel special, they don't require any prerequisite specialness.

So now I have a blog, and that makes me a writer. On a blog one isn't just posting ones ramblings to be viewed by random passers-by or more likely, nobody at all - like so many messages in a bottle, futilely tossed into the stormy sea that is the world wide web. No my dear reader, on a blog one publishes. (I hope you don't find my claim to possessing you here to be at all presumptuous. After all, I have already established that I am, in fact, a writer. And since you are ... well, since you're there, then that makes you a reader. And since the words you're reading are mine, composed, written and published by yours truly, then that makes you my reader.)

So what's so important about this business of publishing you ask? Publishing is the yardstick we writers use to measure ourselves by. "What have you published?", "Where have you been published?" or more simply, "Are you published?" are all questions we writers like to ask one another. Publishing means that one's efforts are not in vain. Publishing means one is somehow contributing, nobody knows to what (though it probably falls under the general heading of: "The Great Conversation"), or how, but it's there just the same, all encapsulated in and guaranteed by the words every blogger clicks as the last step in sending the fruits of their labor off to the great reading public, the words: "publish post".