Yet there were ways in which I felt ready. I’d managed to table my tendency to write in self-righteous rants designed to show off my smarts, just as I’d also lost my taste for reading that kind of material. I felt that I could maintain a serious level of discourse without sacrificing my sense of humor.  And I felt I was ready to hold myself publicly accountable for my ideas instead of keeping them to myself and patting myself on the back for being more intelligent than the other guy. I didn’t have any illusions that there would be much of an initial readership for what I intended to do. But I thought that I might be able to cultivate one simply by letting friends, family and colleagues know what I was up to, circulating the site address among them and encouraging them to pass it along to others if they liked what they saw.

And so I busily cobbled together a mission statement for the blog and rewrote a couple of long film articles I’d completed on spec several months earlier that I’d had no luck in circulating.  These would be my first self-submissions.  I had no editor, no one to tell me what to write or how to write or whether what I wrote was good or not.  And there lies the absolute freedom -- and the absolute fear -- of blogging.

Holding at bay a lifetime’s worth of reticence and fear and insecurity about my skills as a writer, I pasted the first of my three initial articles into the site’s word editor, paused long enough to experience terror anew, drew a breath… and clicked “Publish to Post.”

That was five months and more than 70 posts ago.

The fear of sending my words and thoughts into the vast landscape of the blogosphere has long since subsided. But I’m still struggling with content.  I feel at home now writing about movies, and that has been my major focus so far. About baseball, however, I am still somewhat insecure. But I’m becoming more articulate and willing to keep challenging myself, even as I read other writers on the game whose knowledge and eloquence I know I’ll never approach.  At the same time, my readership does seem to be increasing. I’ve averaged about 1,000 “hits,” or individual visits, a month during the last four months—a minuscule amount compared to most established sites, but far more than I ever imagined I’d have when I first started.

The challenge for me is remembering that the reason I do this is not to reach the masses or to get my ego stroked by constant feedback (like counting “hits”).  The reason I do this is to keep myself steeped in the art and craft of writing, to constantly remind myself of what the art requires—Devotion! Passion! -- and what the craft demands—Discipline! -- in order to stay fresh, alive, plugged in.

Blogging has also become a kind of therapy. I don’t mean that I write and post rants designed to deal with or purge myself of personal demons – although there are blogs that do just that. The therapeutic benefits have come from knowing that my creative energies have an outlet, from keeping in contact with faraway friends through our shared online interactions, from hearing the encouraging words of strangers, and from some of those strangers in turn becoming friends and colleagues, in spirit and in work.

I’m now wired differently than I was six months ago.  I am busier than I’ve ever been, yet there’s an accompanying lightness of being that’s anything but unbearable. I blog, therefore I am? Not exactly. I blog, therefore I get less sleep? Usually. But even exhaustion has been a strange sort of encouragement, a by-product of accomplishment. There’s been focus regained, a sharpened sense of possibilities, of what there is yet to learn, of contributions yet to be made, and now a new forum in which to make them. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. And now, by becoming a blogger, I may just get there.

Dennis Cozzalio’s blog can be found at sergioleoneifr.blogspot.com.  Cozzalio graduated from the University of Oregon in 1981 with a degree in film studies.