Blog wandering

Since I've confessed to my growing blog habit, I figured it might be fun to occasionally talk about some of the blogs I find interesting. It's a big ol' blogsphere out there, but that's half the fun of it...

In the blog vein, I discovered a blog called “The Red Brick Store,” where writers of the Mormon faith have banded together to offer advice and support to each other on their writing journeys. First let me say, I don’t belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but the way I found this blog is fairly typical of my strange blog wanderings.

A fellow author posted on a loop saying she had just gotten a somewhat unusual review, along with the link to the blog where the review (or perhaps anti-review) was posted. I was curious (what’s new, right?) and went to the blog to check it out.

I was a little surprised by the post, and frankly by the Samhain author and her actions which lead to the post too, but that’s perhaps another story altogether. Sufficed to say, I thought such archaic notions of gender held by the author had gone out with the Ark. Anyway, the end result was that I found the blog refreshing and interesting (although not enough to add to my growing RSS feed list) and, as is my habit, decided to see what other blogs that blogger liked. And that eventually led me to The Red Brick Store, and the reaffirmation of something I’ve long believed—that our differences, one human from the next, simply serve to emphasise our similarities.

At the Red Brick Store they talk about the difficulty of being true to both their religion and also their artistic visions. They elucidate the difficulties of forging a new literary path within the confines of the Mormon culture. Support is offered to each other as they individually struggle to find the time, and give themselves permission to find that time, to write. A post by Lisa Torcasso-Downing called, 'My House is a Mess' made me both smile and want to cry. She could be my secret twin, separated by distance and culture, nurtured into a different reality but my soul-mate by nature and desire and need.

The bloggers at the Red Brick Store are bound by their faith, and while I can’t join with them in that respect, I hope they won’t mind my following along with their journey. It isn’t much different from my own, although driven by different forces, but that’s another tale to be told another time.