what a good blogger and a good conversationalist have in common

One of the things I didn't understand when I started my Livejournal four or five years ago was that an author blog is so much more than a way to showcase your writing or promote your books.

When other people read your blog, a small number of them will leave comments, which means the reader becomes the writer and the writer becomes the reader.  That shifting reader-writer relationship plays itself out through a dialogue that makes the original blog post so much more valuable.

A blog is like a...