Time to Blog Again
I must confess, one of the more difficult aspects of being a professional writer, at least for me is writing a monthly blog. I was reading an article on “The Internet Writing Journal” called, “The Authors Dilemma: To Blog or Not to Blog”, by Claire E. White. In it she said, “No longer is it sufficient to write a brilliant manuscript and manage to get it published. Authors now need to be excellent promoters of their own work. And for the intrinsically shy, that can be problematic.” How true indeed.
As she points out, “An entire industry is founded on the fact that people love to read about celebrities’ lives.” Obviously I’m the exception instead of the rule, but then again I’ve always been the type of person to go against the grain. For example: I was in high school in the late 90’s and was listening to the music of my parent’s generation (60’s and 70’s) and had virtually no interest in what was popular at the time (ironically having heard a small sample of what’s popular today, I now find myself looking back on the popular music of the 90’s and thinking “You know this wasn’t so bad after all”). Similarly, I was the guy who grew my hair long at a time when all the other teenage boys were shaving their heads (Maybe they just couldn’t wait for male pattern baldness to set in?) Either way, the point I’m trying to make is that while others may love to read about celebrities’ lives, I often had little interest in such things. When others would ask me about this celebrity scandal, or say how so-and-so said this/did that, My thoughts were always, “Yeah, so what? I doesn’t affect me personally, so why should I care?” Maybe that’s why it’s not easy for me to discuss my personal, daily life. Since I have little interest in the private lives of others, I think “Who’d be interested in reading about what I made for dinner, or where I went driving the other day?”
Another factor that always made me wary of blog posting is the “Issue-Oriented Blog”. Let’s face it, in today’s world, we’ve become so politicized, that it seems you can’t say anything online without someone starting a flame war because you’ve offended them by committing the heinous crime of…having an opinion that’s different from theirs (duh duh duh!!!, cue dramatic musical sting). As Claire E. White pointed out in her above mentioned post, “You could always avoid personal entries and talk about issues or other people. Of course, that leads to another problem: exposing political views that your reader may not agree with. Some authors willingly talk about pet issues, some don’t give any clues as to whether they are liberal, conservative, or independent when it comes to politics. Consider your readership and how strongly you feel about your views, and choose accordingly.” How often do we see that in online comments sections. Ironically, how often do we see people, regardless of whether they’re liberal or conservative, attack the other side for something their political party has said or done, yet when their side says/does the exact same thing, they’ve got a million different excuses as to why it’s okay. Both side are in essence saying the exact same thing, “You have no right to express your opinion, but I have every right to express mine! Because mine are the correct ones!”
Of course, the true irony of all of this is that in my hesitation to face such tasks, I am actually doing just that. Blogging about my personal life and how no one is interested in hearing about my personal life. Blogging about starting flame wars over issues, while indirectly making an issue out of that (my apologies to those of you who wanted to point out my hypocrisy since I’ve beaten you to it).
That just leaves one final option for me. Talk about my fictional universe I’ve created. For it’s not just Mystical Force, but I’ve got several series in the works that will be coming out in the future. As much as I’d love to tell you everything, I’d be giving away spoilers. Not to mention running the risk of information overload. Imagine if you were back in early 1977, Star Wars is about to premiere in a few months. Knowing nothing about the series you ask George Lucas what it’s about and he goes into great detail about the entire franchise: the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy, the sequel trilogy, the ‘Old Republic’, the various TV series and so on. Again imagine this is early 1977; at this time, none of these things have come out yet. You’ve heard of Star Wars but no nothing about it other than it’s a new movie coming out. You’ve been overloaded with all this info on the fictional universe he created, yet most of what he’s told you doesn’t actually appear in that first film and won’t be revealed until many years later. Talk about giving away spoilers.
Either way, I’ve managed to fill my monthly blog quota and find something to talk about, so I hope you found it entertaining, or enlightening or at the very least helped you kill some time while your stuck at home due to the pandemic. So to conclude, I’d like to thank Claire E. White for her post giving me an idea to talk about, as well as “The Internet Writing Journal” for posting it. Who knows, maybe by doing this over and over again, I’ll get used to it and no longer feel uncomfortable talking about myself. After all, as the book Conversations with God said, “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.”