In this entry, I’m going to reflect upon the process of blogging itself.
Through various mechanisms available to bloggers, I can see that the number of readers is creeping up.
Right direction!
And I’m patient with this experiment, as I’m told it can take many months for a blog to catch fire, if catch fire it does.
Not all blogs do.
Ones with a neat niche that interests lots of people grow faster than others.
And some blogs die eventually. The blogger and his or her readers, it turns out, have more interesting things to do with their time.
Such as . . . write novels.
Two short syllables implying monumental amounts of work and rework and rework again, and that’s for trashy flashy tales and big sprawling amazing books like The Brothers Karamazov as well, and everything in between.
So what is my purpose in starting and continuing this blog?
I suppose there are multiple purposes, and also none at all.
Because if I drive this from any of my possible purposes, it’s purpose-driven and that’s not nearly as interesting as top-of-the-head spontaneity.
I think the purpose-which-is-no-purpose is to loosen up my writing mechanism, to let this modified form of free-writing influence how I write, with great freedom in front of imagined–but actual–crowds of people pausing to watch the show.
I don’t know if Harlan Ellison still does this, but he has often sat in bookstore windows with his typewriter and written a story right there.
In a way, that’s what blogging, non-fictionally of course, is about as well.
I have it in my power to delete a blog entry or not post it in the first place. But it’s unlikely I’ll exercise that power.
These are lightning storms, or swarms of fireflies above the back lawns of my Long Island past.
They come, have their moment, and pass by, leaving what detritus they may.
I watch them unfold, as you do, attaching them to passing ticks of time, to moments of now.
Will this amount to much? I don’t much care, and I hope you’re with me on that.
Memoirs. Journals. Now blogs.
We love to stop and gawk at other people’s lives. In many ways, they mirror ours. We glance off them, like billiard balls, and suddenly our lives take a modestly different turn.
Them’s the power of words!