So I bought a new domain over the weekend, mostly because I’m compulsively acquisitive, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it. At first I was just going to buy the name, because I didn’t want to lose the chance (as if there were legions clamoring for the rights to beverlytjerngren.com), but godaddy.com has such cheap hosting plans ($3.95 per month, which ends up being next to free with the weak dollar), I decided to go for that as well. Because I can’t bear just to leave the placeholder page there, I’ve put up my pelargonium list, with links to photos, but that’s sort of a long-term temporary set-up.

Ultimately I’d like to turn it into a showcase for my writing. That’s almost embarrassingly ambitious, considering the woeful state of my “collected works” thus far, but there you have it.

I’ve always wanted to write, but what I have in my head never comes out as good when I put it on paper. I think a good deal of the reason for that is that I’m too self-conscious, in the literal sense. When I write fiction, so much of me as the writer comes through, and my stories scream, “me, me, me”, rather than letting the characters and the plot take center stage.

Lately, as I’ve started to feel more serious about writing, I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a good writer. I read somewhere recently that Art Garfunkel once complained to Paul Simon, “you don’t write for me, you don’t write for the audience; you write only for yourself.” Now, it’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I have, and always have had, Big Love for Paul Simon, but even from an objective viewpoint, that doesn’t seem like a legitimate complaint to me. A day or two after I read it, I was musing a bit about it and suddenly it hit me. Of course … that’s it! First and foremost, good writers write for themselves.

My other big favorite in the songwriting world is Adam Duritz of Counting Crows. His words move me in a way that nothing else ever has, and he wrote and sang the only song that ever made me cry the first time I heard it (no, I’m not saying which one). Years ago, I read an interview with him in some magazine, and the journalist asked him why he wrote songs; that is, what inspired him. He answered that he writes songs because he has to, and that if he had any choice he would stop. It’s easy enough to extrapolate, then, that he writes for himself, not for his bandmates, not for his audience (much as we might yearn to believe otherwise), and not to garner fame and fortune. Hmmm.

Someone else whose writing skills I admire and not-so-secretly covet is Heather Armstrong, or dooce, as she is known in the “blogosphere.” Her entries are so zany and unexpected, so dark and desperate, so laugh-out-loud hilarious, and most important, so honest and true, that we readers feel at once that we’ve gotten into her head and we know what makes her tick, despite the fact that she doesn’t have any idea who most of us are. She has a huge fan base and, on the rare occasion that she allows comments, she gets more comments for a single post than I’ve gotten in an entire year of regular blogging. Yes, I’m jealous. And impressed. And grateful that her writing graces the Web (and that Chuck is such a good sport when it comes to pasta-related antics)

I guess what all this reflection has taught me is that I need to stop thinking so much about myself and to think only about myself when I write. Then, and only then, will I be able to fill my new site with pithy prose. So … go check out my flowers already.