I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.

"Is that really your idea of how to run a newspaper?!?"

"I don't know how to run a newspaper, Mr. Thatcher.  I just try everything I can think of."

To a large extent, that's sort of my approach to this page, and to blogging in general.  I really have no clue what I'm doing, but I'm going to try various things until I hit upon the formula that works.  I've got ideas for at least two other blogs, but this one is sort of a pilot project and one I figure was easiest for me to do since I'm tapping one of the passions of my life for its subject matter, my love of movies.  I'm also hoping to maybe make just a little cash off of it.  I'll admit my motives are partly mercenary, but if I can do something I enjoy and yield a bit of scratch from the effort, well, why not?  Bloggers and artists work primarily from passions both living and unrealized, and at some level the thought of making something off the fruits of those passions has to enter into the mental process if one is going to be honest with oneself.  That's just human nature.

But to return to a more relevant issue to justify this entry, consider the above quote from the newspaper office scene in Citizen Kane (1941).  The young Charles Foster Kane, diving into waters he's never even dipped a toe into before, simply follows his first impulse and launches himself on a new venture with no concern for failure.  It could be said that this was the approach Orson Welles took to making his first ever film.  Welles had no experience with the movie industry or the technical issues of film-making, or the politics of Hollywood and the studio system of the time.  Like his character, Kane, Welles didn't really know what he was doing, but he applied much of his talent as a theatrical producer and stage magician to create his story for the big screen.  That he was also deliberately twisting the tail of William Randolph Hearst, one of the most powerful newspaper publishers of the age, would have wilted the resolve of most veteran Hollywood moviemakers.  Welles plowed ahead with nothing but his own cocksure confidence in success.

By contrast, it has taken me long months of angst over the matter before I finally decided to just sit down and get this blog launched.  Unlike Charlie Kane, I tend not to just dive into a venture without getting everything set up the way I want things to turn out.  I finally understood that I will never have a perfect set of conditions, that I could wait forever reconsidering every angle and never get anything done, and I have too much to do.  So now, I've got this page launched and have my first substantive posting here.  I don't know how to run a blog, I'm just going to try everything I can think of.