“You Can Quote Me”
My very first blog entry appeared online on March 12, 2005. In honor of that I’m posting a collection of excerpts on blogging from entries written over the past four years.
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When something exciting happens and my husband Joe hears me say, “Now that’s something to write home about!” he knows it means I’m going to blog about it.
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Blogging brings out my nutty professor side and appeals to the record keeper in me. I consider my blog to be my writer’s petrie dish, my lab where new work is developed and sometimes launched from.
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My blog is the driving force behind my writing. It’s the place where everything starts, the day to day marriage between my love of the written word and my love of record keeping. If my published writing was a theatre film, my blog would be the DVD, with special features, links to follow, and posted outtakes.
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Since blogs have become popular, there’s been an ongoing public dialogue about their purpose. For the most part, I see them as a modern twist in the ancient art of storytelling. Once an entirely oral tradition, storytelling today is done in a variety of ways. Storytelling venues keep changing, but the reasons for telling stories remain the same. They’re told to preserve culture, to instill knowledge and values, to inform, entertain and socialize. Human beings are a story telling species. We are known by our stories, and our stories are what remain once we are gone.
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The hardest part of Guerilla Blogging is finding your cursor when the daylight casts a glare on your computer screen. You’ll need to learn how to balance your lap top while riding a bike, turn your laptop carrying case into a makeshift mouse pad, and be ready to pick up and move at a moment’s notice when the wireless signal gets low. There will likely be gnats and other bugs to contend with and discomfort from sitting on the ground. And don’t even try guerilla blogging if you can’t get used to being stared at by people walking or riding by. Some will stop and ask what you’re doing. Be prepared to explain what blogging is. Some people still don’t know.
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A blog is to a writer is what a wood shop is to a woodworker or what a studio is to an artist.
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I may speak English, but I think in Bloggish – that ongoing internal conversation that when put down on paper amounts to writing. My Bloggish comes in blocks of thought, too short to be a commentary or even an essay, but just the right size for …a post.
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Blogging is an act of self-sufficiency that isn’t dependent on editors and publishers. Not only is it an immediate forum where you can develop your writing skills, I also believe that when you share your creative output, creativity grows larger in you.
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I consider my blog to be a time capsule of my recent life, which I will print out and bind in a collection for my descendants.
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With blogging, the small press just got smaller. My own blog is a one-man-band writer’s reality show. Not only do I get to write what I want, but I have some diverse and witty readers (many of whom are also writers) that inspire me and sometimes leave comments!
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Sometimes I wish the word “blog” didn’t sound so much like “blob” and remind me of the 1958 movie (The Blob) staring Steve McQueen where something falls from outer space and gets stuck on his arm and then grows and grows until it covers his body. It’s good for blogs to grow – more readers and posts everyday – right? It’s not going to take over my life – right?
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As a writer, my blog gives me the opportunity to break down my body of work into digestible bite size pieces. About a week’s worth of posts will fit on one page at any given time. I think of them like a 7 course meal. I like to have a variety of short and long entries highlighted with a photo or two, a quote here, a link there, and a poem for those who have room for dessert. Sometimes a post is meant as an appetizer to whet one’s palette for a future main course, and often the entries (knowingly or not) are loosely related or compliment each other in some way. After preparing and serving up my own offerings, I frequently go to someone else’s site to see what they’ve been cooking up.
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And lastly, my favorite: I can’t help wondering if I had been jogging instead of blogging these past four years how fit I might be now.
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Post note: To read an essay I wrote on blogging that aired on WVTF a few years ago and was also published in the Hull Times, click HERE.
March 13th, 2009 10:02 am
This IS a very quotable piece and may have to find its way to a broader published forum. I am so impressed with your creative, “nutty professor” concoctions of prose in which you so regularly hit a golden thread of pleasantly readable AND easily understandable “yarns”. Love the way you have woven these strands today from your archives into a tapestry of amazing color and texture.
especially resonate with this patch: “Storytelling venues keep changing, but the reasons for telling stories remain the same…to preserve culture, to instill knowledge and values, to inform, entertain and socialize… Human beings are a story telling species. We are known by our stories, and our stories are what remain once we are gone.”
March 13th, 2009 10:08 am
“XO.” You can quote me on that.
March 13th, 2009 10:21 am
Looks like the beginnings of a book or magazine column to me 🙂
March 13th, 2009 10:38 am
“I consider my blog to be a time capsule of my recent life, which I will print out and bind in a collection for my descendants.” – I like this line. 🙂
March 13th, 2009 1:20 pm
This reminds me how constrained I keep myself as a solely political blogger. I need to spread out, I think.
March 13th, 2009 1:21 pm
Oh, but Colleen, blogging makes your brain fit!! That’s more important that the other parts. Happy blogiversary!
March 13th, 2009 3:13 pm
I’d be gorgeous if I jogged instead of blogged 🙂
BTW, NetChick sent me!
March 13th, 2009 3:23 pm
enjoyed this post very much…a compilation which you so cleverly pieced together into a very interesting article about blogging. i agree with joe and hope you will publish it (or a tweaked/edited version) elsewhere. smart cookie, you are. 🙂
March 13th, 2009 3:35 pm
I actually did have an essay on blogging that I read for our local NPR radio station and which was published a couple of years ago in the Hull Times newspaper. It’s here: http://looseleafnotes.com/notes/2006/11/born_to_blog.html
March 13th, 2009 4:06 pm
My blog drives my writing, too. Happy anniversary, blogger!
March 13th, 2009 7:26 pm
Great post, Colleen. Whatever your reasons for blogging, I’m just glad that you do because I really enjoy your insights and astute observations. Happy blog anniversary!
March 13th, 2009 8:11 pm
interesting perspective.
mind if i ask you this? – when working on a piece that might be submitted for publishing, how do you decide what to or not to post on the blog? couldn’t some publishers consider it already published? ave you ever run into this issue?
NetChick Tanya sent me…
March 13th, 2009 8:16 pm
Some writing starts here first and then I develop it and submit it for publication. Other writing I write for other publications and only after it’s published do I print it here.
March 14th, 2009 3:06 pm
NetChick sent me and I’ll be back as I enjoyed you post..and the entire idea of the blog..
Dorothy from grammology
grammology.com
March 15th, 2009 9:53 am
Very interesting collation. Some great thoughts around the whole blogging and storytelling premise.
March 15th, 2009 6:15 pm
I share the sensation of blog-sized thoughts. What’s permissible/fitting for the medium changes the message. I noticed in one of my writers group, I tended towards prose and longer lines, eventually realizing it was not the group but the 8 1/5 x 11 pad and handwriting habit used there whereas my normal notebook is a narrow notepad where I write short-lined things. Having a space where I am not constrained to public thoughts nor a length of page just a streaming file of hundreds of pages allows different thoughts to rise and take a different route to completion. A different size of studio for different scales of projects.
The many varieties of storytelling are some of what I’m exploring/hearing these days.
I appreciate the independence of blogging, the autonomy and control in publishing where you are the gatekeeper, head editor, quality control takes back an important role, allow different priorities and tastes and voices to be accessible. Distribution is cheap and marketing is in your own hands.
March 17th, 2009 12:15 pm
Excellent post i can see how it affects you and the process Sandy
March 20th, 2009 4:00 am
Do you think perhaps if I keep going back here to read all your posts there’s a chance I will be able to write as well as you do? There must some strange alchemy involved in how you write your posts. Graceful, introspective, pure delight.
NetChick of course sent me. But please note that further visits from hereon won’t be. 🙂
March 26th, 2012 9:55 am
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