I never know what to blog about. Book stuff, sure, but what else? I don’t have adorable children or cats or dogs; I don’t go on crazy adventures or cook beautiful dishes. Pictures of my day would include a computer screen, some less-than-beautiful food, and a scattering of other mundane things: laundry, errands, maybe some pretty scenery from my walks.

But I do think a lot. About everything. And those are the things I often think to write about but then I think, who cares about what I think? Are people really going to take the time to read my thoughts on random things? And I’m always so worried about how everything I write has to be “good enough” to be published, and I worry about talking about my personal life publicly, on the internet, and not calling it fiction, and I worry that I will seem silly and self-indulgent, and I worry that I might offend readers, and I worry endlessly instead of writing.

I read this piece from Claire Bidwell Smith on blogging for ten years (!) and I realized that I love her blog, like so many others do, for her voice. It’s not just her thoughts, but the way she expresses them that keeps us reading. We respond to both the story and the way it’s told, the universal themes in the everyday. Thousands of people have responded to my voice in Hand Me Down, so it’s not unreasonable to believe that some of you might connect with my voice here on this blog if I were willing to put myself out there. Plus, this is a blog, it doesn’t have to be book-level writing, right?

So I’m going to try. Even though I’m intimidated by all the fantastic blogs already out there, even though I’m worried about, well, about everything (all the time), I’m going to attempt to write more confessional, personal essay-ish, write-about-my-experience kinds of posts. Because that’s what I love to read, and that is one of the things I do know for sure: it’s always more fun to write the thing you love to read rather than the thing you think others want to read.

Here’s to more writing and being less afraid.