January 30, 2008

I blog regularly (meaning daily or semi-monthly) at five different blogs. One of these days I’ll tally my wordcount and see how many books I’ve written since the birth of enivri.com. I doubt I’m anywhere near the book every three weeks rate of this blogger. But I’ll bet I do have a few books under my belt by now. Leitch claims that blogging is the hardest job ever. I’m going to guess that he’s never been a mother of a toilet-training 2 year-old or a maid (and neither of them have great tans either). Really.

Much has been written about the relative lack of sales success for books written by bloggers, as if bloggers were an ethnic group, or some sort of easily charted genre. Every blogger is different from the others; I can’t think of a single shared characteristic among bloggers, save for lack of a tan. The one thing we do do, however, is write. A lot. I’ve worked for newspapers, magazines, television stations, doctor’s offices, you name it, and no job requires more daily effort than being a professional blogger. If people have a slow day at the office and do a little less work than usual, hardly anyone notices. If I have a slow day, every commenter on my site lets me know immediately.

This has got to be the best-ever article about blogging. An excerpt:

“It’s the flying. It’s the suspension of punctuation and good manners and even identity. Bloggers at their computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains, and save the world. Anonymous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives…

Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that. ;-)”