The Tangled Interwebs We Weave...

Today is my birthday. I am 24. It seems to me this year should be going better for me than it has been so far, after all, it is my year, i.e. the Year of the Rat. I am (proudly) a rat. Perhaps your year is not the year when everything goes right for you. Perhaps it's just when all the hidden parts of your personality become most apparent. In that case, then, it seems logical that this year I would be filled with self-doubt, which is I think Rat's greatest fault. And I am. So I decided, as a motivation I suppose, to start a blog on my birthday and continue to keep it for a year. The hope is that here I will record my thoughts and progress and by the time my next birthday comes around, when I will be a quarter of a century old, I will have achieved the goals I lay out here today, namely to get my next book in the secure grasp of a publisher--a real publisher--and feel I have finally earned the right to call myself an author, even though I've been a writer for many years. Because, you see, I think the difference between an author and a writer is more than just verb tense. A writer writes. An author wrote. But, like the proverbial tree that falls in the forest unwatched by human eyes, if a writer's work goes unread, has she been utterly wasting her time?
I hope to post some of my writing here in the future, although that is a sticky thing to do, as technically, any writing posted online is essentially published, even if nobody reads it. I will try to put up some previously published poems and I actually have a little short story in mind that would be inappropriate to post anywhere else, but more on that some other day.
So. Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I live? Firstly, I am a writer. That is my vocation. It is the only thing in the world I have really enjoyed doing and that has given meaning to my life. I do not write anything lightly, and hope that my view of the world is sufficiently different and interesting as to be important to others. In the meantime, I hope that my thoughts here will amuse you and give you something to think about that you might not have thought about before. My interests are wide and varied, and I hope to explore them all here as time goes by. I will keep all my entries public for the simple reason that the internet is never as private as some believe and if something is so personal I only want to share it with my real-life friends, I will tell them by other means. I will not be afraid to bare my soul here, though, as that's what writers really do.
Why is my name here Lepus domesticus? Because it's obscure. That's all. I am a sucker for bad puns, word games, and esoterica. It is scientific Latin meaning a domestic, or tame, hare. I got that from W.B. Yeats' poem "Two Songs of a Fool" whose first line is "A speckled cat and a tame hare." It is not my favorite poem of his, though he is my favorite poet, but I chose it because I have often felt like The Fool, but I relate more to the hare than to the cat. The speckled cat will wander out of the house away from the hearth and have his adventures and then return and sit smugly by the fire as cats are wont to do. The hare on the other hand, desperate to stretch her long, long legs will dash out into the woods, leaping and pirouetting as hares are wont to do, and may find herself at last on the table of the hunter, which neither cat nor fool will ever do. The hare's position is the most perilous, and she therefore represents life. We may be as secure as we like before the fire on the worn rug that has adorned our home for centuries, but eventually, we have to go out into the woods, we have to leap, and then we are in danger. So I'm leaping.
Where am I? My home is my center and very much defines me. It is a lovely cloudy day today and I will talk about the weather and my wild neighbors often on this blog. Today, however, I will only say this: Last year for my birthday I had daffodils. This year, there is too much snow. I saw some swallows floating by around noon, however, and a butterfly beat its sharp dark wings against my window. The nutcrackers are hoarsely chattering in the douglas-firs on the hill, protecting their new nest from the deep brown dark phase redtail and her mate, who like to perch up there and catch the wind. And the ravens are always soaring overhead and calling. As you can probably tell by my picture, ravens are very important to me, and to see them floating effortlessly and to hear their throaty rasps and caws and to watch them tumbling over and over in the high wind like so many black feathered clouds, always brings joy to my heart.
Happy birthday to me! Here's to a good year and all it brings!! And here's to all the things I bring to you who read here!