A heads up. This is an interactive post. I hope you'll indulge me and play along for a bit. Get out a paper and pen. I will wait.
Ready? Awesome.
-Garrett
In my opinion, Vanilla Garlic is not a typical food blog. The focus of my posts is rarely a recipe. On the contrary, I often see the recipe as ancillary. The wrapping paper on the package within. The photos aren't highly stylized. They used to be, but behind every image was a lot of frustration. Styled and edited photos were and still are anathema to me. They're lepers I washed out of duty and not out of any aesthetic rectitude. The photos weren't representative of me, my ideas, or my style. It's why I switched to Instagram for both ease of use, time management, and it showed my life in the moment. It was more me this way.
The focus of Vanilla Garlic has always been the writing; both short and long essays, and essays of middling length. The writing has always been what fuels me and my Tuesday morning deadlines, and it always ensures I'm writing every single day to stay practiced.
Now, like the rest of you, I have duties so sometimes passions take a back seat. Dinner has to be cooked, laundry folded, the cat needs his Prozac, and lawns have to be mowed. Things get in the way. The writing isn't always as great as it can be. Sometimes it suffers for legitimate reasons or for apathetic reasons (Real Housewives and Doctor Who), but most often if it suffers its due to a combination of the two.
It's why I do so love practiced writing exercises. They force writers (that's you, by the way; not just me) to sit down and meditate on the process. You take one aspect of writing and explore it. Writing is a muscle, it has to be exercised to be made stronger. Just writing every day helps, the way running every day helps. Both keep you fit. But to stay in shape you also have to life weights, eat right, sleep, and stretch. Writers need to brush up on their grammar flubs, brainstorm, work on methods that collapse blocks, or simply focus on their basic communication skills.
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