I Can Has New Blog

I've spent much of this hot stinking day setting up a new blog, called Dowsing: Finding a New Way to Believe. I'll let it explain itself, but Rob and I had an interesting discussion about spinning off another blog for a different facet of my life. He's been blogging for a while now, too, first from Guam and now from Maine and they're just so fun to read. Rob blogs about his daily life, his students, the areas he lives in, the local culture, the native food (yes, even Maine has native food: the Whoopie Pie), gardening, teaching, singing, church, books he's reading, his car, trips he's taking—you get the idea. It's like his own personal newspaper. I love reading them the same way I love reading his evil twin's blog: The Affected Provincial. They're both smart, funny, general interest blogs. The Affected Provincial's reads like a Victorian country squire's, with his esoteric interests in bog flora, dandyism, art, and natural history oddities. Rob's reads more like the Victorian country vicar's.

Rob was puzzled by why I'd decided to spin off all the different kinds of blogs I've got (fanfic, politics, 9/11, book arts and now one on finding my way to a new spirituality). Blogs ought to, he feels, reflect the multifacetedness of their writers. Fair enough.

Me, I don't think they "ought" to do anything except what I want them to. I'm funny about my tools that way. So here's what I wrote back to Rob about my blogging habits:

Blogs are much more than just journals, which are almost always intended to be private and all-encompassing. Blogs serve varied purposes precisely because they're public documents. I've split so many of them off for a number of reasons.

I have a fanfic blog on Live Journal because that's where all the fanficcers are and we can "friend" each other to read our fic in a little community.

The 9/11 journals I look at more as a historic record, though they're also intimately tied with my love of NYC and my evolving politics—the latter of which I didn't acknowledge for a number of years precisely because of my religious affiliation. Ditto with the Perfidy Report, which I've stopped writing on and will probably delete.

And Blogorrhea is slowly morphing into the marketing tool for my artist's books, hence my desire to make it more about art and writing than about my personal shtuff. So what I think of as my "main" blog, Blogorrhea, is really a marketing medium.  Eventually, when Maelstrom House is really up and running, that blog is going to get a name change to reflect that. The truth is that my readers who are interested in book arts stop coming back when I write about personal stuff. They're looking for book arts news. Those copyright posts I wrote got me more hits than anything—and that's what I want for that blog. It's a source of information, not just personal expression.

Dowsing, however is more personal than any of them, more like a true journal. And I will probably talk about art and books on it as well, but with a completely different slant than I use on Blogorrhea. I will, as a result, have far fewer readers. Journals, after all, are pretty navel gazing. (Secretly, I think I'm hoping I can turn this into a book, eventually.)

I have to disagree with you that blogs have anything they "should" do beyond that they should do what the writer wants them to. But that's the writer's problem. It's a bit like saying paper should only be used a certain way. Blogs are just another tool. I don't think you can treat them as a separate genre with rules. Just by virtue of being on the internet, they are boundaryless.

So anyway, this is why I have a new blog. If you're interested in reading about my personal journey through the realms of science, spirituality, and philosophy to some new kind of faith, come on over. Bring your water wings. It's pretty deep water.

Comments

[Robert Kellerman]

I don't think we disagree at all, Ann. Of course you're right: blogs can be whatever the blogger wants them to be, and I wasn't suggesting that they can't be. But I will say that I do, or did, get a real kick out of reading your blog(s) and never knowing what was going to come up; it's like seeing a person through a really interesting prism that reflects back any number of surfaces. But hey! It's your blog! So far "Dowsing" is wonderful stuff.

And besides, how could I possibly disagree with someone who said that "Rob's [blog] reads more like the Victorian country vicar's"?

[Lee Kottner]

I'm convinced you were a Victorian country vicar in a former life. You still have his soul. You just happen to teach English in this one. :^)

Hope you didn't think I was trying to pick a fight. I've been thinking a lot about journals lately, since I'm teaching a class in writing them (and boy is that keeping me steppin'!) and I thought your comment was a good jumping off place for what blogs (and by extension journals) might be all about.

Anyway, glad you're enjoying Dowsing. I'm really excited by it, though I'm not giving up any of the others, by any means.