Don’t call it a comeback…

…because I was never really here.  But here I am, and like billions of others in the blogosphere, I have resolved to be here more often.

I have been guilt-tripping myself for months about how I don’t write–since March to be precise.  How can you honestly tell yourself that you are a writer, I ask myself, if you don’t ever write?  Well, I’d like to think that I’ve been letting the pot simmer while I’ve been taking care of some other important things: law school finals, graduation, moving, studying for the bar exam, taking the bar exam, and recuperating from the bar exam.  But now I’ve done all of this–well, still working on the last part–and I am still afraid to write.  I’ve managed to sit down and bang out a thousand words of the novel that I’ve been formulating for months, and I hated every single one of those words.

I’m going to stop before this begins to read like a diary entry.  The point is that I’ve lost whatever writing voice that I had.  Imagine a comedian with a few decent jokes but who lacks any sort of stage presence.  To the audience, it feels like he is standing in front of a microphone reading from a list of jokes.  I think most comedians start this way, not counting the few that have  naturally compelling personalities.  Contrast this poor sucker with the veteran who has learned who he is on stage, how he talks, his cadence, his rhythm, and so on.  Now it feels like you are having a conversation with the comedian.  Just a conversation with a gifted storyteller who happens to be hilarious most of the time–and who happens to hijack the entire conversation.

Well, I feel like that first comedian.  I’ve got stories to tell, but without a compelling voice, they read like a catalog of actions.  I have lost my voice.

The only way to get it back is to write.  So, once again, here I am.  This space will be used mostly for small things of little to no consequence: book and movie reviews, essays, thoughts, and–boy, could this go poorly–personal philosophy.  Perhaps more important is what I will try to refrain from putting on this space: pieces that read like diary entries (notwithstanding the beginning of this post) and attempts at fiction (sort of like the embarrassing types of posts for which this space has been used before).

I plan on lightly editing posts, probably just a once over to catch typos and glaring grammatical errors, though those may slip through from time to time.  Expect the writing to be stilted, uncertain, and annoying for the immediate future.  I hope that things improve as I begin to get comfortable with my voice.  I hope that then we will be able to have a conversation (wherein, like the veteran comedian, I do all of the talking).