Day Two

Almost immediately after posting my first entry yesterday, I had blogger's remorse. The whole enterprise seemed silly, embarassing even. I was nervous to look back and see the list of people to whom I'd sent an alert, although all were very close friends and family who would, at best, offer encouragement, at worst, make gentle fun of me. I have a tendency to speak first, think later, and I was worried that in this case I had written first, thought later. Why was I doing this; what was the point? And shouldn't I have determined the point, if there was one, in advance, certainly before inviting other people to read what I had written?

Cringing, I logged back into the site (with some effort) to reread my efforts and was not surprised to find a few suppportive messages from the usual customers. I was surprised to find a comment from a stranger. First, I wondered how this person had found the blog. Then, I couldn't stop thinking about his brief and probably offhand comment. He wrote: Your approach of meeting your writing goal in your blog seems unusual. I'm more used to seeing writers blogging more to put off doing actual writing work.

This made me feel better and worse at the same time, better because it seemed to answer my own question to myself. This was a blog about meeting my writing goal. I could use it, after I got the hang of it, to write actual work, and the few people who know about it could give me input or encouragement if they ever logged in. It made me feel worse because I realized the inherent danger--or one inherent danger--of the blog. The writing could be like this entry, ruminative and ultimately pointless in terms of the overarching goal. It could be yet another way for me to put off doing "actual writing work."

Now I couldn't even remember--had I thought I would write 750 words of an article I'd been assigned, for example, or a book proposal, and just post it midstream? That seemed like a bad idea. Had I decided to post the 750 words just so I could tell myself I'd done it? Why didn't I just pledge to write 750 words every day without the blog mechanism? Was I hoping my friends would serve as combination consciences/editors/nags? Yikes.

I read four blogs semi-regularly myself, and I needed to ask myself why. The general answer is simple: it is because I know their creators. I have never so much as perused a blog by a stranger, let alone left a comment on it. (I know a good blog writer would link to the four blogs I read, but I am not quite there yet, proficency-wise; bear with me.) I read the blogs I read for specific reasons, too. I want to see Nicole's pictures and movie clips so I can watch Eva growing up--the blog makes me feel less far away from someone I wish could be physically part of my everyday life. Kiley is a new friend; I find her smart, funny, quirky and observant, and her blog is helping me get to know her better, at least in this brave, new world online. Emilie is one of the most elegant people I know, and she writes so beautifully--I remember phrases sometimes from pieces she wrote more than a decade ago when we were in graduate school together. The fact that she is living in Africa makes her blog all the more compelling. Gretchen is a person I admire and am fascinated by; her blog is an active part of her current book project, and I can sense her intrigue in the form in everything she writes. She is using the blog to her advantage even as she figures it out.

Reading these blogs has been contagious. I can sense how much their creators are enjoying the freedom of the form, and I can see the ways in which their words and images are controlled and in some cases constrained. I find the immediacy of the blog form exciting and its interactive quality a little bit scary, but in a good way. I am not much of a risk-taker, but writing a blog is a kind of a risk. Maybe I'm needing a risk, these days. It seems entirely possible.

But back to the comment from the stranger. He makes a good point. Although I wrote in my first entry that I want to be read, I hadn't really imagined this blog as a way to attract readers, which does seem, now that I think about it, a little bit odd. Most of the people I told about my blog are people I send work to for feedback anyway. I hadn't imagined the blog as a place where I would post finished pieces on subjects of general interest, or about a particular subject matter, which is generally the way blogs seem to work; rather, I imagined using it to facilitate my actual writing: the articles and books I am working on outside of the blog, as well as simply to make myself write, with the idea that writing begets writing.

Is this a blog about writing and its sidecar of anxieties and baggage? Or will it be the writing itself? I am still working that out. Why should you care? Is this the ultimate self-indulgence? Yes. But I don't see it that way when I read my friends' four blogs. I'm just interested in what they have to say. Maybe this blog is, at heart, really just for me.

Oy. It's 1:30 in the morning. It's not yesterday any more, but I will cut myself some slack on that. This is way more than 750 words. And two days of writing is better than one.