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It’s Just You and Me

The assignment for today is to identify my audience.  It’s more along the line of “figure out the focus of you blog”.  The suggestion is to pick someone and write the post to them.  It’s a good thought, and I have a few hazy thoughts on who I could pick. This is my struggle.

I am a peacemaker for the most part and I hate conflict. I also spent quite a few years being trained by my employer to be a facilitator and to learn the skills to “flex my personality”.  If anyone remembers those Age old personality tests I was a cross between intellectual and amiable.  The company I worked for at that time spend upwards of five years and thousands of dollars to send me to dedicated communication courses at least twice a year.

What does all that really mean? They taught me to communicate. They also taught me (really well as it turns out) what to do to trigger people. They intended to teach how to identify the triggers and resolve the situation. I found out early on there are certain circumstances where I really don’t care if the issue is resolved and I will push the triggers harder. Why not, it’s not like I enjoy talking to those people anyway.

Back to my assignment. I struggle because I have vastly different communication styles depending on who is on the other end of the conversation. It’s not dishonest, it’s the difference between saying “I don’t agree with what you are doing.” versus “That’s a really bad idea because piranhas really like it when dinner sticks their hand in the tank like home delivery.”

I wonder if it’s cheating to write to the authentic me. The one who isn’t so busy trying to make sure she communicates with the best filter possible to match the other person but just communicates “If you are stupid enough to put your hand in that tank, I need to find a new friend because you have obviously lost what intelligence you had when we met.”

Maybe there are some other people out there looking for a truer self, and if they somehow manage to end up here, we can figure it out together.

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Here’s a Left Turn for the Daily Post

WordPress has a daily prompt of one word and it’s an opportunity to write a post outside of my comfort zone. Today’s word is Zoo and I thought I was just going to let it go like all the rest.

Then my brain started spinning threads of words and here I am typing a post.

The word zoo has created a fairly large stumbling block in my writing life. Several months ago I came up the bright idea to buy a book of story prompts to practice writing by direction rather than what’s comfortable.  With the plan in place, I opened the book somewhere in the middle and looked at the list of words.

The story went something like this:

Needed to be about a wild animal loose in the house.

Additional items to be included:

pregnant

community

logo

statistics

democracy

honesty

criminal

ankle

orange

comment

So of course my initial plan was a zoo keeper steals a tiger from the zoo, is seen and ends up taking a pregnant woman hostage.  Hey, it could work.

Except it doesn’t. Well, it works in a “this story will never be believable in any universe” way.  It will be a bad story, even if I can manage to tie all of those elements together. This is my struggle, I don’t want to write a bad story and I have never really just followed the rabbit hole with a story. The choice is made, I am going to write that unbelievable and bad story.  I am going to write it this weekend because enough is enough and it’s time to get that story completed. Who knows, with any luck I will learn something in the process.

Look for the post early next week.

 

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Who Am I and Why Am I Here?

Hello and welcome to my newest adventure.

I have written stories on and off for years, mostly about dogs I used to foster to help generate interest while they were learning to be well adjusted dogs prior to finding forever home. I have discovered it’s much easier to have focused material like a puppy stories than what I am trying now.

If you like puppy stories, I’ve added the link to the site that has all of those stories.

I am currently waiting for my end date at a company where I just passed my 20th anniversary, the termination date is next year. It changes according to what planning has or hasn’t worked out recently.  I am having a few struggles right now with crazy plans, not so crazy plans, family drama and the end of almost half of my life.

When I think about blogging I think that probably 5 people will actually read anything I write. For the most part I want to blog to get better at writing and develop a level of discipline for the writing process. This leaves me with a puzzle, what to focus on in this magical blog.

I’ve chosen to focus on my life, or rather, the crazy things that happen with family.  A job that has in one form or another been around for the last 20 years, also known as purgatory. And last but not least, how I’m managing through or planning for the future.

So yeah, with that kind of focus, pretty sure the five readers will be 1-3 people that know and love me already and 2-4 search engines wanting to sell me some awesome sparkly, shiny things as long as I give them all my personal information and credit card numbers.

So that’s it, again, welcome and feel free to stay awhile and enjoy the fun.