I am working on a short St. Lucia travel piece for an online magazine.

I started it yesterday, and though it only will run about 350-500 words, I’m struggling mightily. It’s interesting, because when I start on these blog posts, I often exceed that number in moments.  I believe the difference in the ease of blogging is probably because of the need for less crafting.

I don’t want to tell you that I just slop these posts up with no attention to the writing, but actually…that’s not too far from the truth. In my defense, I preview these posts several times to look for typos and any other glaring mistakes and I do take the time to make sure I’ve written something true and real.

But I think that immediacy is the attraction to blogs and conversely why we like to read well-written and thoughtfully constructed pieces as well.

There is something about a blog post that is not that far-removed from a chatty email from a friend. It doesn’t feel too studied.

 It might also explain all my partial sentences and incredible dependency on ellipses, not to mention that damned smiley icon on which I have become rather dependent 🙂 Pretty hard to slap in little grinning dots in a real piece of writing. God help us if that ever changes. And yet, I obviously have a very real affection for that little happy cartoon 🙂 See?

I guess that I haven’t writen a ‘real’ article in a while, or at least it feels like it’s been a while, and I’d forgotten how much care I like to take in moving a sentence from one paragraph to the next.

My copy and paste buttons get a good work-out when I’m laying those lines down. And with any luck, when I’m done it will sound light and breezy and fun and like I threw it all together in mere moments.

But now, there’s a few of us at least, who know the truth of that quote (whose source I cannot locate),  “If it reads easy it wrote hard.”