A Blog About Nothing

by Julie Coulter Bellon

Every week I have to come up with a blog topic. This is not as easy as it looks when you post with amazing people like Kerry Blair who is like a spiritual humorist guru and amazes me each and every week. I just plod along, and even though I could never reach the heights of her genius (and I won’t even attempt to), I still try to put out a blog that is fun or interesting or both. And I thought that today, I might share my process.

First, I take a long, luxurious bath. I get all my best writing ideas in the bathtub and I love bubble baths, candles, and a jetted tub when all of the kids are in bed. Because then I won’t get little fingers under the door asking me when I’ll be done.

If the bath doesn’t work, I take a walk. I try to take my fat old beagle with me and pray she doesn’t do any business on any of my neighbor’s lawns because I always forget the plastic baggie and it’s hard for my dog to follow me on her teeny stick legs and pudgy body as I run away and hope the neighbor didn’t see anything.

If that doesn’t work, I try to listen to people in grocery store lines to see if they have anything juicy I could talk about. But today all I got was Hugh Grant getting arrested for assault by throwing a tupperware container filled with baked beans at a paparazzi! Do you think he was trying to send a message? About tupperware? Or beans, perhaps? Was he hoping it would bust open and cover the photographer in beans? It did make me think of the timeless classic, "Beans, beans, the magical fruit . . . "

Sometimes I watch movies and debate on whether or not they are blog worthy. I watched two this week and one of them was Freedom Writers. I’m an English teacher and so I love stuff like that. There was one line in the show that did grab my attention. The dad says to his daughter, "you’ve been blessed with burdens." And I thought that is a very interesting way to say it. We are all blessed with burdens. It’s how we carry them that seems to count. (The other was Open Season and I laughed at that one. The deer gets one of his antlers knocked off and is stunned when he sees his reflection. "I’m a uni-horn! Don’t look at me, I’m hideous!")

If I get really desperate, I talk to my friends and ask them what I should blog about. Sometimes my oldest and dearest friends bring up embarrassing moments from my life that they have long teased me about and I would never want anyone to know so I scratch that off right away. Last week I went out to a lunch with a friend and she suggested I do a Secrets blog and ask why girls seem to have more secrets than boys. But really, how would we know that unless the boys told us all their secrets? Because then it wouldn’t be a secret. However, I did find out some pretty juicy secrets about my friend at that lunch and if she blogged about secrets? Well, let’s just say she could do a year’s worth of blogs on her secrets alone and I bet she’d get TONS of comments.

I always have the old fallback of talking about my editing experience, writing experience, and other such things, but sometimes it seems like I’m repeating what the other bloggers on this blog have already said more eloquently than I could have. I could talk about my fanfic career which seems to be heating up, or the fact that it’s crunch time at BYU right now and all my students want their grades yesterday, or how my book, "Be Prepared" got a really nice review on BellaOnline that you can see here http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art50575.asp

And if none of those things work, I could just blog on the process of blogging. And ask you, faithful readers, that if you have an idea, let me know. I’m open for suggestions!