…and it keeps gnawing and gnawing at the back of your mind until you finally give in?  That’s what started this whole thing in the first place.  I’ve officially jumped onto the blogging bandwagon with the hopes that unlike many other writing endeavors, I actually stick with it and update on a regular basis.

This sort of thing happens to me all the time.  I’ll start something—a book, a journal, a story—and never finish it, never keep up with it.  It’s like, I have this intense desire to create and express something but then it eventually fades away with time and neglect.  It’s the reason why I have so many journals with only the first few pages filled before I moved on to something else, and why many some of my assigned reading books for various literature classes were never completely finished.

Lately I’ve been feeling that need again—the need to express or share or create something—so here I am.  I like to think about things and then put them together, organize information, stuff like that.  So when I tried to come up with a clever name for this thing that would not only be vague enough to cover all potential posting material, but also didn’t sound like a 14 year-old’s AIM screenname (another example of my “creating things” quirk—I went through at least half a dozen screennames in high school) I considered my newfound love of Sherlock Holmes.  Initially I thought, “Hey, I like the color purple and could cleverly call my blog ‘A Study in Violet.’”  I was quite pleased with myself until I googled the phrase and discovered that someone else had beat me to it.  I opted instead for something that sounds like it—hence, “Observations in Violet.”  That phrase is mine and mine alone (so far as I can tell—we’ll see if the copyright police come knocking at my door in the near future).

As for what to expect—anything, I guess.  I got a little trigger happy with my Barnes and Noble gift card the other day and now have the two volume Complete Sherlock Holmes collection, two of Agatha Christie’s most famous Poirot mystery novels, Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express, and a book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens.  Not to mention that I am still in the process of reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.  So basically, anything goes.  Fiction, faith, assorted random observations of life in general, snippets of things I find interesting, etc.  Chances are this blog will be about as random as my collection of reading material.

In any case, this post has gone on far too long already and it is way past my bedtime.  Why does my brain insist on being creative late at night?