atomish

For years I’ve been playing around with starting a blog.  I’ve registered more blog names than you can imagine.  It’s amazing how freely wordpress.com will part with one.  I’m pretty confident that wordpress site names may be the only things that do in fact grow on trees.  For each site, I would start writing, and then pretty quickly lose enthusiasm for the topics.  So I’d create another new name, assuming that if I found the right name the rest would work itself out.

This time, things worked the other way around.  Recently, I started writing some long-ish-form things, essays or stories or whatever they were.  I wrote in a flurry for a month, put it aside, and then came back a few months later to write some more.  And this time, having no blog name yet (just using my name as a stand in) I felt like just maybe a few other people in the world might like to read some of these things.  Like family and friends who feel sorry for me, or some crazy internet person who finds totally banal stories about a stranger’s life intriguing, like those cartoons they have for kids that are slow and nothing much happens but there is a soothing british voice narrating the whole thing so you are entranced.

No this time the name of my blog came after the content, and was mostly picked because I needed something short to fit the style of the wordpress theme I bought for $100 and something that wasn’t already a registered domain name.  There aren’t a lot of interesting seven letter words left to be found on godaddy.com.  42Atoms, for example, was already taken by some schmuck whose entire website consists of ‘Hello World’ in tiny screed in the upper left hand corner.  I guess it takes all kinds of people.

The works are all non-fiction-ish.  Meaning it all happened, and if you actually read these stories that won’t be so hard to believe, but be assured that if you see a conversation in quotes from an event that took place in the 90’s I likely wasn’t transcribing it from a tape-recorder.

And sure, one day I’d like to try and actually publish some things in a real magazine, like The New Yorker, or more realistically, in the op-ed section of an AARP magazine, or on DIYKitchenRepairsAndPersonalEssays.com.  But for now, I’m just happy knowing that at least my grandmother and a few in-laws may feel obligated enough to read my blog before next Christmas should I turn to them over a plate of turkey and ask, so what did you think?  Should I get myself an agent?