High Quality Content

"I still wasn’t getting very many comments but I put that down to the fact that I’m not particularly good at cultivating a community like Pat Coakley (who I learn from every day in so many ways) and I took heart from bloggers such as Shane Adams and Cafe Selavy who produce high-quality content but hardly ever get any comments."

I saw this a few days ago on All the Dumb Things blog, and I've been thinking about it since.  I like the blurb, of course, and if you enjoy reading, Shane Adams is pretty much writing a novel online.  It is all people telling stories.  But the part about not getting many comments keeps me thinking.  In the comment section that followed that post, one fellow wrote:

"I am embarrassed to admit how emotionally I sometimes take the fact that a post I am really happy with, even proud of, does not get any comments at all, not much visitors, being truly neglected by this cyber world. My ego really screams then. Or when I learn that most of my friends don’t ever visit my blog, at all. At all! What kind of friends are they anyway? "

So many bloggers and so little time.  I watch my stats and see how many people come to my posts each day.  I wish I wouldn't.  I used to write long emails to my friends and send them photos and such, and I would be disappointed when they didn't respond right away or in kind.  I would be miffed and decide not to write to them any longer. But then I realized that most people don't want to read that much and that they might look at the photos briefly but since they weren't in them, they really had little interest.  For a moment, I think, I considered them inferior beings, people I might have overestimated, and really not worth the time and effort I was putting into them.  

In part, that is why I began this blog.  It was a way to write one email instead of personalizing ten or twenty (I would re-write each one so that it spoke to that particular being) and let them decide whether they cared to read it or not.  

Most of them chose "not."  

I was alone, alone in the cosmos, alone in my house, I thought.  The blog helped me--to be depressed.  And I didn't need much help there.  

But I had to think back.  All of this started when I got one of the first flat black clamshell laptop Macs at the fin de siecle.  On the other side, at the end of the 'nineties.  It was a beautiful thing, sleek and sexy, and the keys were golden and a pleasure to touch.  I loved it so much, I switched from keeping a journal in a notebook to writing on that laptop.  Every morning.  Five hundred words.  Then a thousand.  Then more.  And the writing became more consistent and more imagaic and more connected.  And who was I writing it for?  

At some point during that time, I read an interview with John Irving.  A student at a university asked him, "How does one become a writer?"  He responded, "Write a million words."  The kicker was that the computer had a word counter.  I could simply do a word count on my journal.  I was WAY over a million words at that point.  

I think Irving, though, left out the part about rewriting and editing.  

And so, there is the genesis of the blog, sort of.  It began, really, with a multi-million word journal, none of which has ever made its way here.  And nobody has ever read it.  Well, except for a couple of girlfriends who did without permission.  And after reading, they both left me.  Very slowly, though, and painfully.  It was only in the end that they let me know about the journal thing.  

But that has been a constant over the years.  Fresh out of college, I was keeping a journal in a notebook.  My girlfriend came to my house when I was not there, and while waiting for me, decided to read it.  She left me, too.  

So I am a little gun-shy about writing.  I write this blog for anyone to read, but I try to remain anonymous and hope that nobody I write about or who lives around me or works with me reads it at the same time that I hope the rest of the world will come.  

And so I write here nearly every day.  There is a consistency, at least, in that.  And I struggle to provide a photo every day, too.  That is harder, of course.  But the effort keeps me alive to things.  

It is a different world than when I started writing.  I realize now that most people don't even email any longer, let alone write letters.  Everything is now said in one hundred and forty characters or less.  Written with thumbs.  Some days, it seems I am writing with my thumbs, but I am not.  My feet, sometimes, yes, but not my thumbs.  

Whatever all this means, I stand by it.  I like that I have been said to post "high-quality content."  Nobody ever told me that about my journals.