Wrong Way Blogging

Wrong Way Blogging

Read any article on blogging, and the self-appointed expert (and how the Web has grown those ranks geometrically!) will tell you that a blog should focus on one subject in order to find its audience, or, in that fin de siecle (I refer here to the end of the benighted 20th century, not to the milieu of the end of the 19th century, for which the phrase served as sobriquet for most of the 20th) phrase, so the blogger can find his “tribe.”  Most users of that phrase probably think the Washington Redskins football club should change its name out of respect for Native Americans, but cognitive dissonance serves as the primary mental state of most U.S. citizens (I refuse to write “Americans” when referring to U.S. citizens, but that is a discussion for another blog post) these days.  What, tribe can be used in other ways?  Yes, of course it can, but I’d be willing to bet those other connotations are not the ones you think of when seeing or hearing the word.

One-topic blogging may be the fast way to an audience, but I have discovered through a number of false starts that it is also the way to boredom with my own thoughts.  Why limit myself to one topic when I have almost innumerable interests?  My interests are eclectic.  I’m a bit of a dilettante, I admit it freely, but any writer who isn’t probably has precious little to say, because he or she has no subjects.  A writer must after all write about something, but if that something remains solely sports or politics or religion or 11th century art, the writer will soon either exhaust the subject or burrow so deeply into esoterica that only a few experts in the same field will care.

So at this reboot of my blog, my intention is to write longer blog posts (I pledge to avoid using “blog” as verb, as I generally strive not to verb nouns) about whatever topic occurs to me two or three times a week:  current events and partisan politics, writing, farming, cars, motorcycles, books, authors, movies, sports, legal issues, social media, travel, personal issues.  In the interstices I may post random bits from my media trawling or a tease from a novel or story or announcements about readings, new publications, book signings, and the like. I may even write in different voices or points of view, appropriate, I hope, to the subject.

Here we go again.  Enjoy the ride.

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