What to blahg about. What to blahg about. What to blahg about. In another month or so, it’ll be my fifth blahgiversary. For a long time, I traversed the geography of cyberspace alone. Well, not really. There were a lot of bloggers out there. I just didn’t have a face-to-face relationship with any of them. Slowly but surely, more and more of my friends and relations have taken it up and even a few who don’t have their own blahgs have asked to participate on my blahg as guest blahggers.

I love this! I don’t come from a family of writers. At least not people who write novels or poetry for a living. Diarists we have. Wanna know what it’s like to starve to death in Northern Saskatchewan in the late 1880s? My great-grandfather and his brother did and we have his diary. Actually, I *am* writing (and coding) for a living right now but honestly, you guys would fall asleep during the first two paragraphs of the documents I write for work. Then again, maybe your head hits the keyboard during my blahg too. But everyone in my family has always seemed to have the basic tools of writing under our belts and, as amateurs, I would say we are not shabby.

So, to anyone who is new to blogging, if the going gets tough, don’t quit! It’s a little awkward at first to put your life out in cyberspace for any random person to read about. Make some rules about what you can and can’t blog about. Everybody knows that work is a good thing to not blog about. But I think that what I said about my job in the last paragraph is probably benign enough to fly. Feel free to change your rules if you need to. Eet’s a blahg, not an international treaty. It can take a while for your blog to find a “voice”. You will find one. Sometimes it will go away or another voice will try to take it over. Be patient. It’ll return. And your voice may change direction.

My favorite blogs are those that just document the person’s everyday life. Their children (to the extent that they can talk about them), other family members, house, community. A good rant is always fun. Whining too, up to a point. Heck, I whine sometimes. Whining every live-long day gets a bit tiresome. “Memes” (still not really sure what that term means) drive me nuts for the most part. If you really want to post every day and don’t have anything, just start out with your trip out to the garbage can or whatever and you might be surprised at where you can go from there. But if you post a meme, I will not stop reading your blahg.

Anyway, whenever I open up bloglines, the *first* blogs I hit are the ones that belong to my kids and s-i-l and nieces and nephews and cousins and friends. I love y’all and all I am trying to do here is encourage y’all to keep up the good work. It’s so great to hear about your lives.

P.S. What *we* did today was: take an early drive to Kalamazoo, have breakfast with Mouse at the Crow’s Nest, drive home, with Mouse, and the jeep. She has the apartment in kzoo and is figuring out a summer which will probably take place between here and there and The Great White North. And she took my afternoon walk with me and I LOVED THAT. And so summer begins.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2008 at 7:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.