why

In the fall I took a copywriting class to support my freelance work. After two years of winging it, I decided it was time to get some actual training to make the whole self-employed writer thing feel more legit. Since then, I've decided that the self-employed writer thing would feel more legit if I was indeed self-employed. What I make freelancing mostly goes to replace appliances and house parts that break.

Anyway, the guy teaching my class told us that we all needed to create a blog--"it's just essential for any professional writer to have a presence on the web," he said. He suggested blogger.com, so that's what I used. I never had an audience or topic in mind. I started blogging because I had to. But I kept going because I liked it.

The semi-discipline of writing semi-publically has been good for me. I said a couple of posts ago that I've been minding parts of myself that I haven't paid much attention to in a while. Writing is part of that. I'm not particularly excited about what I'm writing. But I'm excited that I've been writing intentionally. It's satisfying to give myself these painless exercises and feel good about accomplishing them.

Honestly, though, I'm ambivalent about why I'm doing this as a blog and not as a private journal. Posts like my depression entry last week make me feel like a tool because I don't enjoy reading stuff like that from other people. It's hard to pull off a piece of writing like that and keep it engaging and unpresumptuous-sounding.

Despite that danger, though, the benefit of posting on a blog is that it forces me to pay attention to my style and structure and syntax so that it's not just sloppy, stream of consciousness, "shitty first-draft" kind of stuff. The stuff here isn't super polished, but all of it has been read and reread and edited to some degree.

So I guess what this boils down to is that it's good practice. I'm slowly refining my style, listening for my voice to develop, wondering how it will evolve. And I don't have any expectations for this other than personal satisfaction and maybe some lasting creative discipline.

I know of only three people who read the blog from time to time: my mother (dammit), my wife, and my new friend Angela from Irvine, CA who was the first stranger who put a thoughtful comment on the blog. For a long time my Blogger profile had only 24 views. Last night I noticed it had suddenly jumped to 129. That hardly counts as a presence on the web, but it's not total anonymity.

I have no idea who my readers are or if they're coming back or how often they do. I guess there are ways to figure that stuff out, but I don't think I want to put that much effort into this site. And that's not really the point, either. I'm just thrilled, in my deepest most selfish parts, that people are reading me. That is so much damned fun.