In the course of my procrastination last night while trying to get into my scene, I spent probably an hour browsing around online looking for places to submit my blog. I’m not quite sure why I decided to do that other than the fact that I feel like I have some marginally interesting stuff to read on here from time to time and it seemed like the thing to do. Then I got link happy as you can see from my “Internet Love” over on the sidebar. It’s fun to look at my blog’s ratings on various sites (which is next to nothing on most of them as I just signed up about 15 hours ago). There’s a sense of “someone likes me! Woo!” And yes, I admit to getting a charge off of checking my blog stats over the course of every day (several times a day ::mutters sheepishly::) because I like seeing that people are coming. I can’t make the assumption that they’re actually reading. I get a ridiculous number of hits off of Captain Barbosa from the pumpkin I carved at Halloween and pictures of Gerrard Butler (swoon), and I’m sure most of those folks aren’t looking for a writer’s blog. Makes me happy anyway. That’s good, I suppose. It means I’m easily entertained.
It amuses me when I go off on these self-promo kicks trying to garner readers because when I got started blogging after college on a long ago and far away and now defunct blog at Xanga, I had no concern with anybody actually reading what I wrote. I used it as a daily journal to chronicle my infinitely boring life (and a great many bitter diatribes about how unappreciated I was in that first post-college job–make that the first 3–thank God they let me back into grad school). Almost no one who actually knew me had the link, and I went to a great deal of trouble to change the names of anyone I talked about in an effort to avoid the drama I’d seen in various circles resulting from people not remembering that blogging IS a public forum. I had one friend who read religiously, which caused a couple of problems: when she called she already knew everything that was going on, so we had nothing to talk about and she got annoyed during the stint when all I talked about was my weight loss efforts, using it as a food journal and exercise record. I believe I got quite snippy, actually, as I was not writing for her entertainment or edification. So it would seem that I’ve come quite a long way from that point (approximately 8 blogs later).
I think one of the coolest things about blogging is the sense of community you can develop and the people you can meet. Now as far as I know, WordPress doesn’t have the impressive organization of communities that, say, Livejournal does. But I do find myself a part of a fun and interesting collection of like-minded author bloggers (pubbed and not). And that, dear friends, has made the effort well worth it.
