Pillow Book

This blog has turned so random it's a wonder anybody reads it!

A book is more of an artifact, subject to success and failure, praise and rejection. A book to those of us who are literary types, a book printed on paper that sits beside our bed and can be returned to again and again, is the best thing of all.  To write a book seems the highest of goals for a writer.

A blog, on the other hand (which I never thought I'd like writing so much as I do!) is something like a pillow book.  More on that later.

This one has recipes and poems and rants--along with some book and movie opinions from an amateur reviewer, me.  But if you look at the origin of the word, amateur, you'll see that it means "to love to do." I'm happily an amateur book reviewer and photographer and traveler.

The joy of doing this thing is that it keeps me looking at things and recording my observations--and at the end of the year, it's my diary of the year, the ups and downs, the friendships, the surprises, and the connections with people in my orbit.  To love to look at things: I heard someone once describe herself as a "scopophile"--a lover of looking. That's us, those of us who read and take pictures and write.

And it's a connection with the people who read it and write emails in response--that are often more interesting than the posts to which they are responding!

I love books on paper.  I love underlining and writing in them, the feel of a pen settling in to someone else's pages and conversing with the author.  I love returning to books-on-paper after a long absence like friends. But this blog is its own quirky thing.  I love all of you who are reading along and sometimes sending emails saying so.

My dear friend Joy--a much-published children's book illustrator and creator of the ornament posted on an earlier post, "Traveling Solo," sent me some pictures of her wonderful, fanciful clay people yesterday.  What she said about the "satisfaction of finishing something in one day" applies to blogging.  A book takes many drafts to complete, a cover design and title to decide on, and the awareness that reviewers on Amazon will blast it or praise it.   On a blog, like the pillow book I'll write about later, you get wander all over the map and have the satisfaction of arriving someplace in a single day.