Friday, February 24, 2006

On blogging

I reached 50 posts on this blog last week so I thought I'd take stock of what I've done here, and -- all in all -- I’m pleasantly surprised. I’d resisted keeping a blog for a long while, until I was signed by Berkley and felt I would have solid writerly news to relate. I'd been reading other author blogs for about two years, learning and enjoying. I only comment on maybe 6 to 8 of those I read. I'm shy when I comment on someone’s blog, in fact it feels like a big deal to me, especially in the beginning. Silly I know, but it’s putting a comment on someone else's webspace, after all. Respect... :-)

It’s still early days and I’m finding my feet here, but I’m glad I seem to have posted a couple of things of interest, in particular my comments on the erotic/RT article. I truly thought I was just waffling to my closest writing buddies, Zaz and Wendy. I’ve been really pleased when other people said hi. Two editor/authors that I respect and admire suggested people read what I said on erotic fiction, (I was amazed,) and Diana Laurence herself dropped by to comment on my comments...about her comments. Almost a dialogue, in fact :-) This blogging stuff really works. Hmmm…I wonder if Johnny Depp will say hi after reading my review of The Libertine ROFL

It got me thinking, because I hadn’t ever really decided what I want to do with my blog. LOL Naughty me. I had a list of things in my head that I didn’t want it to be. For a start I believe in the “if you have nothing to say, say nothing” approach. I have a lot of permanent health problems I don’t want to yack on about here. I also don’t want do quizzes, tags or find out what colour my soul is. What I do want to do is reflect a bit of my life as a writer, and a bit of my wider lifestyle, for my fiction readers who like to hear this stuff. I thought I might share a few funnies, although I know my sense of humour is weird. I also wanted to chart my progress as my first single title goes to print, and offer any tips that might be helpful to new writers. Because I used to do a lot of music reviews and wrote for the Rough Guide to Rock, I thought I’d also do a commentary on any gigs I get to.

What’s surprised us here in the Walker household is that the blog serves a few functions we hadn’t foreseen. We go from week to week forgetting what we've done a few weeks before (old fogies that we are) but we were impressed and rather surprised to see we’d been on two city breaks and attended two gigs in the same number of months. And there was us thinking we never did anything. I like that added dimension, that we will be able to track back and see what happened when. I was never a great diary keeper, so this felt like a big hurdle, but so far I’m enjoying it. I don't promise to be saying worthwhile things about erotic fiction every week, though. You have to visit Alison Kent's blog for that. ;-)