I did it again.I spent WAY too much time futzing around on the internet tonight when I should have been sleeping or blogging. Cleaning wasn’t an option. I got sucked into my new favorite site called goodreads.com. Thanks to this site I have a HUGE list of books that I want to read now and perhaps I will never blog again since I will be holed up in my room in absorption mode, unable to string a sentence together and I will forget what letters are next to what on the keyboard.
my ‘currently-reading’ shelf:
I am a seasonal and cyclical reader. I go on big book binges and then take a break from it for awhile. These days I have not been too into writing in my blog (if you haven’t noticed…3 posts in friggin’ March, geesh!), and I don’t feel guilty about it honestly. Blogging thankfully is something without a deadline (well that is unless you have an obligation to your advertisers or membership which I don’t). I know that I may have lost some readers through my lull, but I don’t really worry about it. If they liked it well enough, they will check back in later. I stopped any series I was doing, and stopped creating tags and stopped commenting on other people’s blogs. I even took down my most popular posts strangely enough. I think I got a little freaked out at how exposed I was in them, and wasn’t sure that I wanted such personal stuff revealed to those who found me the way some did. Yes, I write for people to read it, but I find that like-minded people tend to find each other through blog-land, and I write for myself first and foremost, the readers are just a plus (usually). Blogging is not like writing a book. You can edit and delete comments and posts and have a bit of control. And you often get out of it whatever you put in. I discovered that to get a lot of readers you have to read and comment on a lot of blogs. And honestly I don’t have the time or inclination lately. Perhaps I will someday, but right now my hands are pretty full and I can’t give myself specific guidelines for posts or comments or I will just start to resent blogging.
Once upon a time and for a long, long time everything I did was all about survival or for the desire to achieve. This is the first time that I don’t need to do any of that. I read because I like to read, I draw because I like to draw and write because I like to write. I am able to put down the weapons and just play. It is not like it was before children of course. I do not have the luxury of being able to act on an impulse to be creative whenever it strikes me. I have to plan out times or grab them whenever I can. This makes inspiration tough sometimes. The “hurry up and relax” feeling you get as a parent is often “hurry up and create” for me. It just isn’t fun. So lately I have just let it go and written in the blog whenever the planets have aligned and I have had inspiration to write along with the time to write. Yes, that was a total of three times in March. I guess you can say that I have scaled back my efforts to make this blog a big read. Instead, I just want to use it to write. Thats it…and visit my favorite other bloggers and comment if I feel like it. The blogging community is a really great thing and something I love about blogging. Its the stat reading and husstle for blog friends that I couldn’t justify spending my time on. Id rather read a book, or draw or see a movie. I know it sounds like I am being a non-joiner/hater here. I just don’t want blogging to be about
me being accepted, or popular or achieving any big goal. I just want it to be a place that I write when I want to. I take this as a good sign. It always amazes me how I can take anything that needs to be done and outline it and delegate and manage it in two seconds flat…the music biz has trained me well. My head has been so trained to be task oriented it is nice to just let that go for a change and have a space to be Lebowski about it. Thats me in blog-land these days. Stumbling into the supermarket in my robe, writing a post-dated check for a quart of milk, driving a LeBaron. I am not one of the Junior Achievers. Instead I am finding that playing and reading good books and just being happy with where I am is the biggest step I have taken in a long time.
Well, now I have a list of books I want to read and have no excuse for brain freeze/title and author amnesia at the book store. Use up that $2.83 left on the ol’ B & N gift card leftover from Christmas. So many blogs do book reviews now. And reviews of everything from kids toys to other web-sites. I hate to say it, but where’s the writing? I guess the web-log part of it can be whatever little scrapbook type of thing you want to put up there. Can I put my grocery list up there then? Maybe I can scan in my cell-phone bill. Yup, all this criticism from someone who posted this photo a few months back:
Its whatever you want it to be I guess. If Oprah can have a talk show that also reviews products and books, well I guess my blog can too. Well, sort of. Its just a link to my page on goodreads.com but thats as far as ill go I think.
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