I mentioned last week that I had become obsessed with a mausoleum I found while wandering through a cemetery a few weeks ago.

This mausoleum family’s story is both fascinating and tragic, and there really is enough here for me to write an extended piece on them. I could include all sorts of interesting facts like the top speed of a car in 1916, the state of not-quite-modern medicine at the turn of the century, and divorce laws in Nevada in 1912.

I could include personal anecdotes, drawing a line connecting my own experiences as a daughter (of divorce) and as a wife (of a busy, important professional) and as a mother (who has her own interests beyond parenthood) to this mausoleum family.

My discovery of the mausoleum on that sunny March day could encompass several lyrical paragraphs.

This could be absolutely epic, my best work yet.

Epic enough to… publish? I started poking around the sad corners of the Internet where aspiring writers hang out.

The local history magazine would want something very academic and well-researched. It has been a long time since I’ve worried about the Chicago Manual of Style, but this is something I could accomplish with enough motivation and some hand-holding from my almost-a-PhD reference librarian friend. Although… making academic research interesting is not exactly a writerly strength of mine.

What if I wanted it to be more of a memoir? I’m good at the memoir-type stuff. Who would want something like this? Is there an anthology of personal essays about cemeteries coming out soon?

Perhaps American Cemetery & Cremation Magazine would want this if I could turn it into a touching advertisement for mausoleums? Is that my angle?

I tried to write it for all these markets. I spent a lot of time agonizing over the themes and how to present the dry facts of a person’s life in a compelling way. I inserted references. I wrote long, imaginative paragraphs about how these people felt and loved and lived and died. I dipped erratically into my own life experiences. And yes, I did look up the top speed of a car in 1916.

And I deleted all of it: every paragraph, every perfectly constructed sentence. BACKSPACE FOREVER. Back to the top of the blank page. Over and over I did this, for days.

I finally acknowledged the crisis I was having. I cannot write this for a market. There is only one way (for me) to write it and in order to do that I have to slam the door on submission guidelines and editors and marketability.

I have to write it for the blog, because the blog can be anything.

Last Friday I sat down with the blank Word document and I spent five hours writing a rough draft of about 2,000 words. It is messy–my first drafts always are–but the scaffolding is in place for revisions to work their magic.

Is it going to be good? I think so.

Is it going to be great? Well… I wouldn’t go that far.

But it doesn’t really matter because it’s for the blog now and the blog can be whatever I want it to be. Some of my readers will wade through the whole thing and enjoy it. Others will abandon ship by the end of the second paragraph because it’s too damn wordy and they are probably right about that.

At least I wrote it, and I never would have if not for the existence of this blog.

But I hope that eventually someone with either more talent or more motivation than me picks this up and writes a really good academic piece for Minnesota History Magazine.