Greetings, everyone! I am blogging once again after what seems like a zillion-year hiatus to me. Normally I would hate to deprive anyone of my unique viewpoint on life, the universe, and everything, but life, mine in particular, got a bit out of hand in the past month. First there was diversion of energies to two other writing tasks; then an illness in the family; next, exceedingly hideous tax forms that still are not completed; and, of course, the usual dose of migraines. Pretty soon you're looking at a whole month of your life gone by.
During the time I was not posting, I experienced a nagging sense of something quite like guilt, as if I were shirking a responsibility. Nobody made me start this blog; there is no money at stake here; nobody is going to get promoted or demoted if I write or don't write. So why the sense of obligation? Is it just the Catholic guilt hangover? Well, whatever I do, I want to do it well, so there's that. A blog by its very nature is supposed to contain frequent postings. Yet surely the frequency is at the blogger's discretion, and unless one is blogging for work, there isn't, or shouldn't be, any Mininum Weekly Blog Quota.
During the unblogged month, I found an article about big-stakes blogs via Arts & Letters Daily. Blogs that aim to be profitable, to spin the news and so on. Trevor Butterworth tells us:
To deal with the punishing treadmill of endless posting, Gawker and Wonkette each now has two editors. But the economies of scale are such that a second writer is not going to change output to the point where readership or ad revenue will double. What a second writer will do is provide security for the brand - and the means to fact-check gossip that could otherwise turn into a blog-destroying lawsuit.
What interests me here is that phrase - the "punishing treadmill of endless posting". And the notion of branding. During the time I was not posting, I thought several times to myself, "I wish I'd given Friend X access to my blog so she could post stuff while I'm out of commission". I wanted my own second writer to deal with the punishing treadmill of endless posting! This seems very silly and I am now officially giving myself permission to have huge gaps between posts if and when it is necessary. Or even if just because I feel like it. It's not a job.
I have also been considering, since the first day of this blog, whether I ought to have some kind of tracker that will tell me how many hits my blog is getting. I don't, because (1) I haven't yet taken the time to figure out how and (2) I've decided that paying attention to how many hits your site is getting is not in any way helpful to speaking your mind as plainly and completely as Zuska likes to do. I am content with comments, which are a conversation of sorts. Butterworth tells us:
The problem is that few blogs do...much traffic. According to the monitoring done by thetruthlaidbear.com, only two blogs get more than 1 million visitors a day and the numbers drop quickly after that: the 10th ranked blog for traffic gets around 120,000 visits; the 50th around 28,000; the 100th around 9,700; the 500th only 1,400 and the 1000th under 600. By contrast, the online edition of The New York Times had an average of 1.7 million visitors per weekday last November...
I am pretty sure that I am not one of the two blogs that gets more than a million visitors per day. I am also pretty sure that I am not even the 1000th ranked blog or the any-ranked blog. Does this matter? No. I started this blog because I wanted to say certain things; I wanted to say what everyone else is thinking but is afraid to say; I wanted to rant on about all the things I could not rant on about when I was employed and had to make nice a lot of the time. If you read this blog and find solace then that's good. Whatever good or useful purpose this blog may serve, that use will not be measured, I think, by number of hits.
Butterworth's final critique is that the blogosphere suffers from tedium, because of blogging's own relentless nature - the "pornography of opinion...[leaves us] longing for an eroticism of fact". (many a lovely turn of phrase in this article!) Here is Butterworth's summation:
And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news.
It's so mournful. Makes you want to give up blogging altogether and curl up in the fetal position.
During the unblogged month, at the same time that I felt the pressure to blog, I also felt the sort of despair about blogging that Butterworth expresses. Who's listening, after all? If it doesn't matter whether I say anything or not - then why say anything? My blog is not going to wind up in a Modern Library edition yellowing on the shelf. (Although what more good it does there yellowing on the shelf, as opposed to drifting in the ethernet, I am not sure, if no one is reading it in either place.) All of this matters, and is very depressing, if you are writing primarily for some audience other than yourself. Of course, we all write with an audience in mind, and hoping that the audience will attend to our brilliance. But I think writing is first and foremost a selfish act, and in this case the selfishness is good, because the act of writing can nurture the writer and then possibly produce something wonderful that others will want to read.
I do want my blog to be read. But before that want, I want to write.
3:44:11 PM 
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