"A tale that grew in the telling"

So begins J.R.R Tolkien's forward to The Lord of the Rings, and so I hope to be able to describe this blog in the future.

As some friends and family know I have been planning on starting this website for the past 3 years. During this period I discovered one of my time black holes: Static Blogging Engines. Whenever I began the researching I would inevitable waste an entire weekend debating trivialities and features of competing blogging engines while never settling on anything.

This continued on and off for the better part of three years before I finally decided that something, anything, had to be published. That day has come, I can finally say that my site is up.

So Why a Blog?

Honestly, I have no idea what this site will turn into in the months and years to come. My belief is that through regular updates this site will evolve from its questionable start into a coherent whole in the same manner as The Lord of the Rings.

While I have no goals for the site itself, my hopes are that through writing here I will

Improve My Writing

Refine My Ideas

Organize My Thoughts

Update Family and Friends

Improve My Writing

Even though I am pursuing a Masters Degree in Literature & Language at the Mythgard Institute I am not a good writer. Every semester I feed incredibly intimidated by all of my classmates who routinely turn out phenomenal work. Meanwhile, I can barely manage to keep afloat with basic gramk and punctuation usage.

You can only become a better writer by, get this, writing frequently. It is my hope that through regular posts here I will gradually improve in both the basic skills of grammar and punctuation but also in communicating my ideas with a broader audience.

Refine My Ideas

While working on a term paper I made a major discovery about myself. It turns out that I had no idea what I was writing about until I was writing the concluding sentences the same paper. At this point I began to re-write the entire paper to accurately reflect my own viewpoint.

Extrapolating this out to my life in general, I tend to develop my ideas best through talking aloud (preferably with someone listening) or writing about it.

I would love for this site to become a place where I can take fleeting thoughts and turn them into well thought out and constructed ideas. I doubt the usefulnesses of these to anyone except myself, but we shall see.

Organize My Thoughts

On my computer I have hundreds of notes reminding me how to perform tasks which I do semi-frequently. For a long time I have been wanting to organize these for quick reference at a later date. While many of these are unique to me there are at least a handful which might be helpful to a wider audience. It is my plan to take these and post them on this blog once they are fleshed out a bit more.

Update Family and Friends

Finally, I would love to think that my immediate friends and family could follow this site to stay up to date with what is going on in my life – but I doubt this will be the case. It turns out that the intersection between my interests and those of my friends and family is non existent.

Maybe, however, they can learn another side of me. Or possibly this blog will facilitate the development of new friends with common interests.