In Defense of Blogging*

I sometimes ponder the viability of this blog. The page views are typically a few dozen; comments are uncommon. The frustration always passes and the blog continues. Why?

 

Because I don’t write the blog for anyone except myself.

 

What about interviews? I do them because

I enjoy doing them and

I like helping other writers get the word out, even if only to a few dozen people.

 

The core reason I do interviews is because I love to talk about writing. Just because we’re not doing it in real time does not mean I don’t enjoy it. I ask questions I am curious about and look forward to the answers with the hope of learning something every time I get a response. I am rarely disappointed and I am not above sending follow-up questions if the initial response opens the door.

 

As for the other posts, this blog is where I work things out for myself. Some topic will strike me – or, more often, gnaw at me – and I’ll form an opinion. Opinions being like assholes (Everybody has them and they all stink), I like to work mine out. Try to develop my own counterarguments and how to either address them or change my position if I find myself to be mistaken.

 

Several draft posts a year never see the light of day. I either abort them partway through the first draft or they cannot support their own weight through the editing process. I do not consider any of that time wasted. I learned something, even if all I learned was that my initial thought was not worth airing.

 

It’s also gratifying to receive the occasional comment of appreciation, such as when I list my favorite reads of the prior quarter and someone thanks me for bringing a book to their attention. Or when I review a TV series or movie, or build a list, and people thank me for pointing out something they had not known, or felt was underappreciated. Writers often operate in vacuums, me more than most, so that is how I keep my finger on the pulse of what is going on around me.

 

So the blog continues. (This is Post 1,094.) I promise not to engage in too much navel-gazing, or too blatantly shameless self-promotion. I am always happy to help others, so feel free to hit me up for an interview or guest post if you have something to promote. If I’m full up, I’ll tell you, but I try to be as flexible as possible with scheduling my posts if it will help to accommodate someone else.

 

(* - A tongue-in-cheek homage to Peter Moskos’s fine and thought-provoking book, In Defense of Flogging.)

1,000, 1K, M, or a Grand Post

 

This is the one thousandth post to One Bite at a Time; the first was August 17, 2008. The blog has gone through many changes, both in topic and frequency. It has wavered on the brink of extinction a few times, and at times been something I couldn’t wait to get to.

 The original plan was for it to serve as what marketing people call a platform, a social media presence so readers and potential readers could see how my mind worked. As most of us have learned since, blogs aren’t so hot for marketing unless you’re already at least reasonably successful, or willing to work 23 hours a day at promotion in general. That knowledge almost killed it until I realized how much good I’d done by providing myself a place to work out my thoughts, knowing I’d apply a higher standard to those I made public than I would to things that just kept floating around in my head.

 Where did the name “One Bite at a Time” come from? As I described in Post 1:

 One day a few years ago, The Spousal Equivalent (Editor’s Note: She has since been promoted to The Beloved Spouse™) caught me whining about how discouraging it was to know I had probably fifty thousand words left to write on the current project. The thirty thousand I already had on disk were of no consequence. As a writer, I'm not one of those "glass is half empty" guys; my glass is broken and the water is running onto valuable things that will be irretrievably damaged by the contact.

 She recommended for me to stop looking at the enormity of the total task, and to "eat the elephant one bite at a time. Now there's rarely any more on my plate than I can accomplish in a day, or some other easily digested period of time, and I never have those slumps where I can't bear to sit down and write because I can only accomplish an infinitesimal amount of the work before me.

 Sometimes coming up with a post a week is work. It’s never a chore. I have posts planned out for the rest of this month already, as well as some interview questions I need to get to that will carry things into February. As little Roseanne Roseannadanna’s father used to say, “It’s always something.”

 Thanks to everyone who has followed me these years, as well as to those who only occasionally stop by. Special thanks to those who comment. All writers understand the feeling of sending words into the void. It’s always nice to get feedback, even if in disagreement. Sometimes especially disagreements, as they provide food for thought. I’m always looking for good reasons to change my mind.