BLOGGING: Space & Place

In checking in on comments and stats, I’ve found only a very limited number of readers interested in my reading reviews, and those few are not interested in the personal nor the writing exercises.  Am I needy?  A whiner?  Probably.  But the fact that only one person bothered to click on my project link in a prior post tells me something.  And the fact that this problem seems to come up on a regular basis with me demands decision–not mere repetition of, okay, I’ll keep plodding along ’cause two people said I should.

What to do?

Well, I’m not going to close shop with a year paid in advance, but I believe some rethinking of my weblogs is called for, and while I’ll start planning for it now, it probably won’t be done until the first of next year.  My big plans to be considered a literary weblog flopped, and even with the emphasis on literary analysis, somehow I’ve not been selected as an official literary site although many I see that are include more personal entries, or are mere "link-on-logs" which point to the biggies.

On the other hand, I’m no longer interested in blogging my daily routine nor my personal ups and downs exclusively.  These things inevitably creep in, as I am basically honest and open–at least written word-wise–but I’ve tried to keep them to a minimum or include if they relate to what I’m reading or doing in literature, or, when they just can’t be stoppered up, present them metaphorically. 

While it has often been pointed out that we writers are supposed to write for ourselves, this is pure hogwash.  Everyone needs to be appreciated.  We’re not 16-year old diary keepers; we’re writers and we need an audience.  Is an actor, dancer, singer content spending his talent in front of a mirror?  If we wrote merely for our own self-satisfaction or need, we can more easily write straight into Windows Word and the heck with sharing or hoping for acknowledgement.  Weblogs do, however, seem to provide a certain discipline of meeting false deadlines by their nature of being dated and read–or at least, scanned.  But a weblog can also be unpublished and private, so that only wandering Googlers ever, to their disgust when they’re trying to do research or find porn, mistakenly plop into someone’s weblog world.

So the paths diverge.  Maybe a less down-home and more professional literary analysis will be one track, and another non-fiction creative writing.  In the meantime, I’ll do my best to keep up with the road I’m on and not take lack of interest personally.  We all have something to say, and I need to realize that with the explosion of good writing seen in a growing weblog community, we just can’t take the time to read them all but instead have the glorious option of selecting those of particular interest or quality.  I think that one of the best elements of a weblog is the ability to comment, and I long ago gave up the fear of it seeming too much like leaving a calling card and comment often as a means of showing support, opinion, encouragement or appreciation.  The field is constantly changing, and with it, so too shall I.