Theme Thursday--The State of the Blog

Theme Thursday this week is about blogging, and since I have been at this about 7 months now, I thought the prompt was a good reason to take a bit of a look back at my blogging experience thus far.

Most of my life I have done some kind of writing. As a teenager I wrote lots of poetry, frequently on topics I knew nothing about. As I got into high school and college, I frequently wrote essays and speeches, some of which had promise according to my teachers. In college I majored in theatre, so of course I wrote plays. Four of them were performed during my student years. I married a musician, so I wrote lyrics for him. During the years he worked as a choir director, I often adapted Bible texts for him so he could set them for the choir. Meanwhile I was always jotting things down in notebooks, making starts on books, coming up with couplets, most going nowhere but into a pile of notebooks. I also was carrying on lengthy and literate correspondences with several friends Here is what I learned from all this: most of us can't be Emily Dickinson, throwing masterpieces into a shoebox writing for herself alone. We need an audience to write for. The audience we are writing for then shapes what we write. When I was in college and had access to a theatre and actors, I thought in lines of dialogue. When my husband needed something, I wrote in poems. I was creativity in search of a medium.

Then my dear friend Mod Mom started her awesome blog, and suggested I would enjoy blogging as well. I watched what she was doing, read what a lot of other bloggers were posting, and realized that a blog would be a good solution to my problem, since it would give me a reason and an audience to write for. So with a lot of help for Mod Mom walking me through the process, I launched my blog. I had a couple disadvantages, the first being that  I didn't have a computer at home to write on,at least not one that worked and accessed the Internet properly. I decided that if I waited for the working computer to happen I would never get started  and so  relied on the kindness of friends and trips to the library to begin with. Now I have a pad that I do most of my writing on. (This is the place perhaps to apologize for the occasional typos that I don't always catch. Blogging on a pad is a little like writing a really long text on an over sized cell phone. Someday soon the tech issues will be resolved I hope.) My other disadvantage is that I do not write a humor blog. I wish I could. I am told that I have a great sense of humor, but it somehow just does not  translate well in written form. for  I know a lot of folks are looking mainly  for laughs, and who can blame them?  But there is an audience for the thoughtful tearjerker as well.

 For a long time I had 4 followers, bless their hearts. A lot of what I wrote got no comments at all. But I kept writing because I was sure sooner or later the traffic would come, and at least some of them would look at the archives as well, which is exactly what has happened. Every time I have a really well received post, I see people going through the older posts as well.

I had been posting for a couple of months before I got up the courage to start joining challenges and blog hops.  This of course drew far more traffic, greatly increased my numbers.  I found they stimulated my creativity even more than my numbers, giving me both ideas to write on and an audience to read what I wrote. Moreover I learned so much from the writers who were posting along with me.

The biggest surprise I have had is how universally kind everyone has been.  One hears so much about nasty trolls hitting the blogs, but so far I have been lucky. Nothing but compliments and insightful suggestions. Last month Jenn at Something Clever, who also hosts this blog hop was kind enough to promote my Blog although I'm not sure how well the "Meg promises not to make you cry if you follow her on Twitter" thing is working out.  Even the spam has been more amusing than anything else. 


My posts  seem to have fallen into three areas so far. There are posts I have written in direct response to events like when our dog died or when I went with the boy on a college visit. There were posts written for the various challenges and blog hops that I have participated in. Finally there are the ones that I have been carrying around for ever and finally got around to writing, like  Beautiful. Sometimes they will merge. I had been thinking for a long time about how my husband and I did our wedding on the cheap, and then Theme Thursday had a prompt for Weddings  and there we were.

I  have been trying to work on my faults, especially my tendency to go on too long and give way too many examples of everything.  But I notice I am becoming a bit less long winded.

I find that after a little more than half a year, that I am really enjoying this blogging journey, and I glad to have found my way to this wonderful community. Getting to know all of you has been a great pleasure.

Now what do I write about tomorrow?



This post is part of the Theme Thursday blog hop.  To see more great bloggers write about blogging click on the button below.


dog died