It is 9:45 in the evening. I got up sixteen hours ago. I needed to hop in the shower before my daughter had her turn. Then, I was off to a 7 AM meeting about local politics, a 9 AM meeting with a person searching for a new job, and then home to do some reading, some writing and some technology work.

In my readings today, I found the question that Jock Gill asks, http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/archives/000232.html >“why do you blog?”

More and more, people are writing about why bloggers blog, and I spent a little time glancing at various articles and research. People tend to divide bloggers into two categories, the A-list bloggers with larger readerships, mostly on political topics, and “the rest of us”, typically characterized as angst ridden teenage girl vanity presses.

I’m not sure that I really fit into either category, and the articles don’t add much to my thinking. Going back over Jock’s question, I translate it in my mind to “why do you write?” Some famous writer once commented that the way you tell a real writer is that he answers, “Because I must.”

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, I dropped out of college and moved to New York where I lived with friends, a painter, a photographer and a sculpture. I moved to New York to write, to be a poet. I had gotten poems published in school literary reviews, but that was about it.

Poets have to eat, and I needed to find a job that would support me. With a strong background in computers, I found a good job and ended up spending most of my time with computers, and very little with writing for the next twenty years. As the millennium came to an end, so did my first marriage and a very high paying and stressful executive IT position.

Over the following few years, I have supported myself by consulting, worked with a few startups, and found more and more time and more and more need to write. While I’m not sure I can call myself ‘a real writer’ yet and I doubt many people would list me as an A-list blogger, and while the answer may seem somewhat devoid of content, I find that the answer to why I write, no matter how pretentious it sounds, is “Because I must.”