[Personal]
[personal] Luffing the sails a little bit
I’ve been talking a lot about politics on the blog lately, and I find I have a lot more to say. However, it’s not actually my intention for this to be an exclusively, or even largely, political blog, so I’m luffing the sails a little bit on those topics, until at least next week. Don’t worry, my ranty self will be back. I’m keeping track of the topics I want to cover. Never fear.
Which leads to a larger musing about the editorial voice of my blog. (Or really, anyone’s blog.) Basically, this is a blog of Stuff Jay Likes to Talk About. I don’t sell ads, I don’t have sponsors, no one pays me for this. So you see here a largely untrammeled partial view into my interests, including but not limited to:
- Parenting and
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=1)
the_child - Writing
- Cancer
- Photography
- Politics
- Science
- Travel
- Weird stuff
- Food (including, specifically, cheese)
- Movies
Not to mention a ton of other things.
Mostly I blog to entertain myself. I figure if I’m not entertaining myself, I sure as heck aren’t entertaining you. This is what I tell writers who ask me if they should blog: “Only if you want to, and only if it’s fun.” Otherwise, why the heck are you doing it? Nobody wants to read someone else painfully putting themselves through their paces. That’s just as true of blogging as it is of fiction.
Obviously, not all of my blogging is fun. My cancer journey surely has not been. But if not fun or entertaining, it’s still something important for me to talk about.
I generally don’t talk about my emotional frustrations, or the times when the_child
I blog because I like to talk about stuff. Enough of you read this blog to make the discussion interesting for me, but I’d probably still be blogging even if I were only talking to myself. This helps me organize my thoughts and make sense of my world.
Why do you blog? Or conversely, why don’t you blog? Do you have an editorial voice?
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Posted: 4:50 am Wed July 11 2012 |
Where am I?
You are reading the blog of Jay Lake, speculative fiction writer and author of hundreds of short stories, many novels, and winner of the John W. Campbell Award.
Learn more here.
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Why I blog and the way I do it has changed wildly over the years. When I started blogging, I did it because I was trying to connect with friends – it was a largely social event, fandom related (anime, mostly), and involved a lot of cross-posting and commenting.
Over time, that changed. I blogged during my most painful growing-up-away-from-family stages; during my terrible-health stages; during my this-jobbe-sucks-eggs stages.
I stopped blogging for a long time when the stresses of everything came to be too much. That actually wasn’t good. I was hiding.
When I started blogging again, it was all about trying to learn how to “be” a writer. (Trade secret: you WRITE.)
These days, I mostly blog on things that hold meaning to me, with the idea that they might hold meaning for other people. I guess I want folks to be able to learn from my mistakes, and share their own gleanings. I like the idea of moving forward together as a community, helping each other with successes and failures (read: educational experiences).
I blog partly for the same reason that I used to keep a paper diary for, namely to keep a record of events in my life and my thoughts on certain subjects. Coincidentally, it’s also a way of keeping links to posts, articles, etc… that interest me, because I periodically purge my bookmarks, so my bookmark folder won’t be overwhelmed. Of course, my blog is also a way to share links to content I find interesting and to engage with discussions on subjects I care about. Besides, most people in my real world environment don’t read the same books I do and don’t watch the same films and TV shows I do and don’t consider discussions about books, films and TV relevant, so blogging is the only way I have to talk about these things.
The topics are a pretty wild mix and I am aware that some subjects, e.g. posts on German politics, won’t interest a large part of my readership. But if I care about it, I post about it, even if no one but me cares. I figure that readers can easily skip the posts they don’t care about, just like I skip posts that I don’t care about on the blogs that I read. I hardly ever post about my translation work because of confidentiality issues and I am fairly vague in posting about my teaching experiences. In fact, I don’t even name the school where I teach and I make very sure that colleagues or students are not recognizable. I do post about politics on occasion, but I’m careful, because I don’t want my blog to cost me a current or potential job. Like I sometimes say to my concerned parents (who don’t quite get blogging, but have heard stories of people losing their jobs over Facebook postings), it’s unlikely that an employer will not hire me, because of my opinions on certain books or TV shows. Oh yes, and I keep out of racism discussions, because they have the potential to turn ugly very fast and because a non-US perspective is not very welcome in such discussions anyway. Of late, I’ve also been careful about criticizing Fifty Shades of Grey of all things, because rabid fans of the trilogy have been attacking outspoken critics, so any criticism has to be prefaced with paragraphs of disclaimers.
I have two other blogs, a publisher blog where I usually discuss writing and publishing related issues as well as an alternative energy and environmental engineering blog, which I set up for the homepage of my Dad’s company. I hoped he would blog occasionally, but he never got the hang of it, so I update it very infrequently, mostly to link to articles on energy and environmental issues.
I don’t blog – I’m an editor, not a writer, by profession (although 3 years ago I did help to edit someone else’s blog for print publication). Even if I could keep it up on a daily basis, there are already excellent bloggers out there covering the topics I’d have the most to say about. And blogs I’ve seen that don’t include daily posts tend to slow to a stop.