Rant of the blogging variety

I wore my NaNoWriMo shirt today in part because it was one of the few short-sleeved shirts in my drawer and in part to psyche me up to go the the Albany NNWM meet up tonight. Which I did! Had a nice little dinner, met a couple new people, did some sprints (we alternated twenty minutes of writing with twenty minutes of chatter) and had an all around comfortable fun night. Thanks everyone!

My neighbor raised the topic of publishers wanting writers to have blogs, and what that should look like and what about the required social media. After the topic started to move away I turned to my neighbor who had raised this subject and –yeah I know you’ll be shocked– had a small rant about it.

I told her that what I see is a whole bevy of people who hear – must tweet, must facebook, must blog – in order to demonstrate to potential publishers they have a following. What they do is collect a whole bevy of people who also want to demonstrate to potential publishers that they blog, facebook, tweet and have followers. This evolves into re-tweeting, guest-writing on other blogs, sharing facebook posts…

Listen, I said. As a long time blogger I urge you to think about what blogs you really look forward to reading. Myself, I want to know more about the person who’s blogging/tweeting/facebooking. What did they read that was interesting? What did they do today? What happened to them? What caught their eye? Are they working? How do they feel about it? If it’s a writer and they tweet that they’re driving cross country and writing as they go, I want to know more about the trip. If they write about their process, I’m interested in reading what they come up with. What can I learn from them? Maybe they’re a painter and they write about how it was a joy to get going on a new project today or that they figured out something about an old project. Maybe they decided to try something new and talk about how that came about and what it was like. That helps me with my process too.

Listen, I said. Write about YOU in your blog and everywhere else. Not big swatches of your work but maybe an occasional paragraph that you are proud of or something that helped you get back on track. Or why you got more done today than yesterday. Tell me about yourself and your work. Tell me about the song lyric that’s stuck in your head.

OK, sorry for the small rant, I said, climbing off my soapbox.

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