I got interested in blogging on my own a little over a year ago and have tried, with only a couple of misses, to write something everyday this year. Some mornings there is "no ink in the pen" as anyone who reads me regularly can attest, but with the political season in full swing, there is always something new and fresh to get blood boiling.
Anyway, readership has picked up quite a bit and I'm thankful in an odd sense for that. First of all, no one makes much money with advertising on a little blog so that isn't either the issue nor the reward. What does give me pleasure is the sheer fun of writing - of thinking and typing and not looking back. I'm no Mozart and don't mean to imply that, but I don't go back and edit and labor. What you see/read is the one and only shot at it. No anguish. Just write.
When I was in college we were taught the art of a "technical paragraph" at Valparaiso University. Topic sentence, three paragraphs of 3 sentences each and a concluding thought. Short, declarative sentences. It was agony and I was very bad at it. The first "paper" like that took me days to write until Judy Hall, my composition instructor, called me into her office and batted me upside the head so to speak. She put a mottled blue vase on her desk and asked me to talk about it. I was, of course, tongue-tied. It took a while but she kept at it. The vase was followed by a picture of a summer camp scene with kids swimming. Next came dominoes (she was from Texas and they play dominoes there a lot). She then dismissed me and told me to go back and write down what I was saying in my mind or out loud. Hmmm.
The difference here is that others (not just an instructor) are reading this. It is somewhat unnerving to think that some days 500 or so people visit one's writings so I'm more careful to hit the spell check at the end now and to look for sentence fragments but I don't write first in MSword and copy/paste. Then it would seem to much - well, just too much.
Anyway, the latest milestone of sorts is that sometime in the next couple hours this blog will go over 10,000 readers in the past couple months since I reset the AdWords account in middle October....so my daily rate is about 10 times what it was when this started.
I hope this is because this blog offers a different perspective on things - a fresh set of eyes so to speak. Whatever it is, thanks very much for reading.
Anyway, readership has picked up quite a bit and I'm thankful in an odd sense for that. First of all, no one makes much money with advertising on a little blog so that isn't either the issue nor the reward. What does give me pleasure is the sheer fun of writing - of thinking and typing and not looking back. I'm no Mozart and don't mean to imply that, but I don't go back and edit and labor. What you see/read is the one and only shot at it. No anguish. Just write.
When I was in college we were taught the art of a "technical paragraph" at Valparaiso University. Topic sentence, three paragraphs of 3 sentences each and a concluding thought. Short, declarative sentences. It was agony and I was very bad at it. The first "paper" like that took me days to write until Judy Hall, my composition instructor, called me into her office and batted me upside the head so to speak. She put a mottled blue vase on her desk and asked me to talk about it. I was, of course, tongue-tied. It took a while but she kept at it. The vase was followed by a picture of a summer camp scene with kids swimming. Next came dominoes (she was from Texas and they play dominoes there a lot). She then dismissed me and told me to go back and write down what I was saying in my mind or out loud. Hmmm.
The difference here is that others (not just an instructor) are reading this. It is somewhat unnerving to think that some days 500 or so people visit one's writings so I'm more careful to hit the spell check at the end now and to look for sentence fragments but I don't write first in MSword and copy/paste. Then it would seem to much - well, just too much.
Anyway, the latest milestone of sorts is that sometime in the next couple hours this blog will go over 10,000 readers in the past couple months since I reset the AdWords account in middle October....so my daily rate is about 10 times what it was when this started.
I hope this is because this blog offers a different perspective on things - a fresh set of eyes so to speak. Whatever it is, thanks very much for reading.
Comments
Post a Comment