A Blog is Born... er, Two

Back in the early 2000s, I finished up an English major and a library science master's degree and promptly lost all my creative juices. Or, more accurately, I spent six years building an academic mind that, while excellent at meeting deadlines and writing research papers, gradually crowded out whatever pure and basic need I had to express myself. I was drained... clean. Even though I had written for pleasure almost as long as I was able to write, I stopped writing. For five years. And I didn't miss it. I was glad and relieved to have exhausted myself; grateful to live instead of write. Or think, for that matter... it felt great to stop thinking.

But the thing about dried-up thoughts is that they're only temporary... the mind needs rest, a season of latency. And then the thoughts start coming back. And back and back and BACK, which is what happened to me, until I had no choice but to start expressing myself again.

At first, I did everything except write. I got married, planned a wedding, found a new job on the other side of the state, and moved myself and my hubby to a new town. This all happened within 3-4 months and not necessarily in that order. We bought a house the next year, which I proceeded to decorate on the inside and landscape on the outside. I set up a 36-gallon fish tank, planted it with live plants, and stocked it with fish, including two gold Angels. Through dumb luck, these Angels paired up and occasionally mate, the female laying eggs on the tallest, cleanest leaf she can find. After the male fertilizes them, they take turns fanning their translucent pectoral fins over the tiny white eggs, hovering there at eye level, waving their wings to increase water circulation. This prevents the eggs from becoming stagnant and corrupted by fungus.

For some reason though, the Angels weren't enough for me. I set up another fish tank. And another. Then I tore down the third one to compensate for the fourth I had acquired. This final step happened once more, but I've finally stopped at three functioning tanks, with two in storage. (Although... I have been dreaming of putting a fourth back up again, this time for a group of six female bettas.) And around the time of the aquarium explosion, I also started painting. And scrapbooking. And within this same time-span, I started writing a novel. Something inside would not SHUT UP.

Whatever the reasons or how I got here, this blog, along with its twin Radiant Likeness, exist because I have chatter in the brain. Bad. Chatter so bad that sometimes I can't sleep at night. Chatter that forces my husband and sister to listen to my in-depth analysis of topics they have only a moderate amount of interest in. These topics include soap operas, literature, and politics. No, I don't believe I have a mental illness... or if a mental illness can be caused by the repression of creativity, then perhaps I do have that. Does it have a name?

Either way, my floodgates are wide open now, with barely enough outlets. But you're writing a novel, you say, isn't that a massive outlet? And yes, it certainly is. But novels have rules, set by the novelist herself. Novels need a consistency of what goes in and what stays out... and even if those rules seem nonexistent to the reader, the writer knows what they are (most of the time). So, there's just too much junk in my head that really really really can't go in my novel. Yet, it has to get out. And if I'm going to spew a lot of random and unfiltered observations at the world, even if those observations are backed by a surprising energy, I'm not going to drown my novel in them.

So here I am. The Internet, with a capital "I." Sounds like a good place for a brain dump. This blog, Library Cat, is going to be a hodgepodge of various topics I like: cats (see my kitto Oliver above), libraries (where I work), travel (whenever possible), fish, nature, animals in general, books, literature, reading, writing, television/movies (especially soap operas), etc., all examined through a feminist prism. Don't get me wrong -- this site is for FUN. But feminism is so much a part of me that it is the one lens I can no longer drop at will... it's always there, even when I try to ignore it. Even so, Library Cat will be a pretty light blog (and why shouldn't it be?), full of potentially fun, inane, & trivial insights.

But... if you happen to be interested in stronger feminist fare, check out my other blog Radiant Likeness, where I plan to fully plant myself atop a feminist soapbox. Here I've given myself license to unleash on politics, pop culture, religion, social norms, and of course THE PATRIARCHY, as well as everything around and in between those topics. If Library Cat is a carefree mosaic of various feminisms, then Radiant Likeness is more along the lines of fierce and focused feminism (which, by the way, doesn't mean that it can't also be fun!).

Again you ask, why two blogs? Can't you just post the hell out of Library Cat?

It's true, I could. And we'll see how this goes... if I can unclog my brain a little then I may end up phasing one of them out at some point. But for now, there's just too much to say.

And as for Library Cat, though inherently feminist, my soapbox of choice much of the time will be a different kind of soapbox, the kind that extracts deep-seated satisfaction from that much maligned and stigmatized (yet often feminist) genre -- the soap opera. *gasp* What?

Let's begin.

Crossposted sections at Radiant Likeness.