A New Interface. Also, Caveats.

I am very wordy when it comes to introductions. Actually, I am very wordy in many areas of life. Even spoken statements generally come prefaced by a lengthy and parenthetical Foreword. My friends and family have become patiently accustomed to this, but a new group of blog readers may not. So I should preface this introduction by saying: I appreciate your patience.

I don't want to be terribly wordy all the time. To say everything with excessive verbiage and long run-on sentences is to run the risk of logorrhea: a fifty-cent word meaning incoherent, unstoppable verboseness. Literally, word vomit.  Good writers are concise, and that's what I want to be.

But I'm not there yet.

So here we are, at the beginning of a new chapter. It's a new chapter in my life in many ways. I'm on the verge of graduating from college. I'm getting married later this year. I'm learning new skills and reading new books and wanting to write new words. (Not, like, actual new words that I made up. Just new combinations of words. Hopefully concise ones.) And therefore, a new blog seemed in order.

You might have known me in the past as the author of Yet Another Period Drama Blog. Writing there has petered to a halt and I find it hard to get the engine revved again on that page. It's lazy to use the same cliche that I hauled out a paragraph ago, but that was a chapter that seems to have been closed now. I started that blog when I was sixteen and maintained it (kinda) until I was twenty-two, and it served me well. But now I am ready for new things.

I thought long and hard (okay, for an entire evening while I was at work) about whether a new blog would be a good thing, and what I would call such a thing. I started a new sewing blog a few months ago, meaning to keep it up while also reviving YAPDB, but they fizzled out together.  Those who study such things say that when you write for the Internet and want to be successful, you must stick to one topic only, which is why I tried to keep up a movie/book/general thoughts about life blog along with a sewing and handicraft blog, but neither seemed to work.

Those who study such things also say that we're in an age of microblogging now, of Twitter and Instagram (I'm on both, although I mostly just use Instagram) and Snapchat (I both snap and chat in real life, but do not combine the two) and what-have-you. The Blogger days are dying by the wayside. But I love Blogger, because it's familiar (despite a bunch of stupid new updates that nobody wanted anyway) and comforting to me, and because I need space to air my thoughts and write with more than 280 characters and caption hashtags. (Not bashing those. I like those, in their place. But they are not MY place, not really.)

So here we are. A new blog, a new day (I'm writing this at 2 AM because inspiration struck when I got home from a late-night shift), and an experts-defying combination of the things that interest me. I will write about books and movies and the stories that inspire me. I will write about history and people who fascinate me. I will write about sewing and knitting and crocheting and the projects that frustrate me.

And maybe it won't be successful, but that's okay, because at the end of the day my writing really is rather narcissistic. Not that I write only about me (well, okay, I do some of the time) but that it's for me. It clears my mind and helps me to know what I'm truly thinking, and I've grown a lot as a person (okay, that's how the saying goes, but how else are you supposed to grow??) through so doing.

I'm calling this blog The Bluestocking Dressmaker because it seemed to combine my two main interests: reading and being a nerd about history, and sewing. (The word "bluestocking" derives from a women's literary society in the eighteenth century founded by the brilliant Hannah More and was eventually used in the nineteenth century to refer to a woman who was, basically, a bookworm.)

Caveat #1- I absorb a lot of media that are not books. (Yes, that is a grammatically correct sentence. The word "media" is plural. Look it up.)
Caveat #2- I make a lot of things that are not dresses. But "dressmaker" rolls off the tongue much more pleasantly than "sewer" or even the less drainage-suggesting "sewist."
Caveat Emptor- This translates as "let the buyer beware" and seemed cutesy and fitting. I don't plan to sell you anything on this blog (unless my sewing or freelance writing become wildly popular for some reason) but we can edit a bit to let the reader beware. I don't know what may come of this new venture, but I hope you will join me to find out.

I'm writing this post and leaving it here before officially announcing elsewhere that this blog exists. But if you stumble across it of your own accord, do let me know, and have the honor of the first comment on a new blog.