Blogging - trying to improve my writing

I have discussed several times (here, here and here) in the past about why I blog. I blog to practice writing, to procrastinate instead of doing real work, to vent, to talk about my passions, which are often topics that people around me in real life are sick of hearing. In the beginning my posts were mostly about yoga. I had lots to reflect on after most of my yoga classes. Now that I have slacked off on my yoga practice, my blogs have turned into this bottomless pit of self-victimization and self-pity.

I think being negative and playing victim allows the thoughts in my head to flow freely. As depressing as it may be for my readers, spelling out my ruminations helps me form sentences that make grammatical sense and flow from one phrase to the next, a feature which is lacking with my manuscript writing right now. I also think that I can't stop ruminating because nobody ever took the time to listen to me vent when I was younger, so these same thoughts just ran themselves in circles in my head and carved deep, deep tracks in my brain. I'm trying to release my daemons, but more of similar thoughts just keep coming up.

I had never had any inkling of desire to become a writer. I have always wanted to wear a lab coat and play with test tubes. It's ironic I ended up being a double-writer - must write computational scripts and manuscripts for a living. I can't complain though, since test tube playing turns out to be 1000 times more frustrating than writing. Experiments fail and most of the time you have no idea why. Recently I watched the talks by J.K. Rowling and Elizabeth Gilbert, who both mentioned how much they wrote every day and how many times they had to be rejected to get to their superb writing level today. I don't think I can ever catch up to them, especially since I only blog once a week. All I want is for my paragraphs to be understandable enough to get accepted (stylistic requirements for scientific papers are a lot lower than for-profit books written for the public).

In addition, Gilbert mentioned that you must find something you love more than yourself and keep working on that. I think I love cool discoveries more than I love myself. So that's what I will keep doing and home I find center/home through what I love, despite all the politics, bureaucracy and power struggles. If I need to become a better writer in order to achieve what I want, then I will keep practicing.

I will try to blog less negativity from now on because those are too easy for me to blab on and on for ever. Will try to come up with more challenging (and interesting to read) topics.