Dear Blog,
It has been a great many months since my last post. I can cite all sorts of reasons but honestly, the biggest one is that I fell out of love with you because I’m pretty sure I was blogging for some wrong reasons, some right reasons, and some reasons that are less important to me now. Which pretty much confused me then overwhelmed me then made me want to crawl into a hole for a whole. So I did.
What does that mean for our relationship? It means we are going back to basics and we are going to get to know each other all over again. It’s gonna be mostly you and me kid because, well, when you drop off the blogging merry-go-around your friends, people who comment on your posts and interact with you, well they tend to disappear. Blog, don’t feel bad. It’s not you, it’s me. I stopped commenting on other blogs so people stopped coming over to check mine out and well, that’s the first step in a break-up, people stop really talking to one another.
But Blog, here’s the other thing, times have changed. I started blogging back when writers weren’t blogging very much at all. My very first blog was over on blogspot and for a long time the only conversations were between me and Don Tate who was also a pretty new blogger. Back then Don was just circling the publishing mountain and oh boy, now he is doing all sorts of things, writing wonderful books, creating terrific art, and speaking out for diversity in children’s literature. Through it all, Don kept on blogging, kept rolling with the social media changes. Me, not so much. I’m an early adopter. A sprinter. The long-haul commitments have been hard on me, especially when things feel one-sided as they often do. Not just for me. For many of us.
Anyway Blog, you remain my first love. Twitter took me away from you for a time as well and Facebook but my heart, really, my heart belongs to you Blog because I can tell you things more in-depth than I can post in any of those other places.
I jumped on the blogging bandwagon and loved it, especially when I moved over to LiveJournal and met so many of my friends there. We closed the circle around the water cooler and vented and cheered and cried through so many things together. I was going to try and list everyone and I realized, my goodness, I simply couldn’t because there are so many of the kidlit bloggers that I got to know when blogging was hot and heavy and took up most of my day between writing posts and responding to them. But know that I love you all and am so grateful you came into my lives.
So I’m back. And I’m going to try and do this a little differently this time because really, I have no choice. Times have changed. Everyone is blogging and no one has time to visit and comment on the gazillions of blogs being published every day. So instead of letting that make me feel bad, I’m going to try and let it make me feel free. Free to explore my writing world and how it has changed and what I plan to do next. Because I feel sorta lost in the publishing world lately. It’s been years since my last book came out and I’m not sure what direction my writing is going to take me next. Well, I have a few ideas and I’m going to explore them here. With you. Because I know you understand.
And if it is just you and me doing this dance with no one watching, that’s okay. It just gives us more freedom to explore and go crazy.
Blog, we’re going to get to know each other really well. Some serious navel-gazing about to take place. Are you up to the challenge?
I thought so.
To start with I am going to try, no, never mind. I’m not going to tell you what’s coming next. I’m just going to come over here and sound off when something strikes me and share it and move on. You’ll never know if I am going to talk about writing or art or photography or looking for a house or dealing with a dog or the fact that there is no chocolate in the house when my craving for something sweet threatens to overtake me.
You’ll be surprised by how much I share with you. Again. The way it used to be.
Trust me, Blog. This is going to great.
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Audience response is great, but you really can’t rely on it. You just have to have faith that people are out there and if not, you’re giving prospective agents and publishers something dynamic to google.
Peni,
You’re right, of course. It’s sometimes hard though when I feel like I am going backwards. In the old LiveJournal days, there was constant (almost instant) interaction and a lot of it. But I’m trying to adopt the attitude that times and I have changed. This is more of an archive and exploration for me. I have no new books to promote so I can relax. Well, as much as it is possible for me to relax. And I can try some new things.
Susan, I shall look forward to reading future blog posts. I’ve never done a blog though I’ve thought about it. Reading all the blogs on the Open Creative Bedlam Group is sometimes intimidating……deep thoughts etc. going on. I think your post was really encouraging and that you have the right attitude.
Patricia, thanks for stopping by. I really appreciate the comment. The stuff at the Open Group can be very intimidating, even for an experienced writer. Young, fresh voices, etc. And there is SO much content all the time. It is hard to accept that I won’t ever be able to keep up with it.
This will be such a different journey on the blog than I have taken before. It will be fun (I hope) to see where it takes me.
I am so glad you’re back and that you’ve overcome the silence!
Karen, thank you! I ALMOST emailed you about this post. I found your email this past week with your beautiful poem and I cringed at the amount of time I let go by without a response. I am so so sorry. I loved your poem and loved that you were motivated by reading my blog to do some writing of you own.
Thank you so much for the support. The blog may be wiggle-wagging all over the place for a while but I’m back.
Hello, Susan! So nice to see you back in the blogging saddle. I have similar feelings about how my blogging life changed over the years and similar ideas for what it means to me. I pretty much blog for myself because (1) I don’t really have a readership anymore, for the reasons you enumerated and (2) it’s my way of documenting my life. I’m so glad I’ve blogged over the years and absolutely love to randomly select a date from my archives to see what was going on with me then. I’ve never been consistent about keeping a journal and while I’m not hugely consistent with my blog, either, it’s way better than nothing.
Welcome back!
Tracy, thanks so much for sharing your blogging thoughts. Yes, that’s what I want to do now is to document my life. I figure some day my grandson might get to know me better and it will all be right here. And every once in a while I get an email from someone who has found an old page and something resonates with them and it lets me know that doing what I am doing, my way, is the right thing fo rme to do.
And YES, ditto on the journaling, no matter how hard I try. The LJ blogging was the closest I ever came so here I go, trying again. The thing I have the most difficulty with right now is keep track of the old bloggers that I DO want to keep in touch with. I miss Google Reader a lot.