oddness
This is odd. I've never just sat and watched my blog disappear day by day before as its seven-day cycle ticks by. It's gone away on various occasions, but it's been because I was away too. I wasn't sitting here and looking at it. And it's not like I don't have anything to say. It's that I've fallen prey to the same thing that stymies my first-year students: notions of audience.
I've always treated this blog like a commonplace book with a fictitious audience. (I wrote about that stuff here and here.) Then I went to C's and met a bunch of other bloggers, and we started a listserv and went around and gave out our blog addresses and everything. I do this all the time, right? Quite a few people I know read my blog, and quite a few strangers read my blog.
But I have been weirded out by suddenly actually knowing who a certain segment of my audience is. Knowing their names and what they do and what institutions they're at. And knowing that they think I'm (gasp) semi-professional.
They'll get over thinking that pretty quickly, because I've decided to get the hell over this and get to blogging again. So never fear: more redheads and disjointed meanderings coming up shortly!
Comments
yippee! (audience schmaudience)
Posted by: shelley | April 7, 2004 8:13 AM
Thank goodness for that. Just as long as we don't start getting semi-professional commenters.
Posted by: qB | April 7, 2004 4:26 PM
Audience anxiety, my old enemy...
I've struggled all along over whether I want an audience at all. Or, more precisely, whether I want to put myself in a public enough position to attract one. Now I try to suck it up--am I going to fret and fritter when people buy my (fingers crossed) books? Partly it's deciding exactly what I'm comfortable offering up, and what I'm not, hence my shifting directions. So, long story short (too late), I'm trying to solve the audience dilemma by writing the same way on my blog as I do in my "serious" writing, my fiction. If I wouldn't reveal it there, I don't reveal it here and the audience issue becomes identical for both.
It means there are topics I don't approach on blog, or I do it more obliquely (or in someone else's comments), but my comfort level is higher. Except when I start thinking about all those accessible archives...
PS I also decided to get over my anxieties because right after I took the site down a few weeks ago, blog know-how got me a job. But more about that later.
Posted by: steve | April 7, 2004 5:10 PM
funny thing about a sense of audience as a motivation to write :)
and yes, you are in my news aggregator thanks to us meeting at c's :)
Posted by: charlie | April 8, 2004 12:07 AM