It’s a milestone, don’t you think? It seems so to me. This blog post right here, the one I hope you are currently reading, is the 100th blog entry by Michael Jarmer. It took me two plus years to get here. So help me do the math. What is it? 50 posts a year? That’s 4.166 posts a month–but that wouldn’t be accurate, really, because there have been months at a time when I posted not a thing, and I’ve never posted less than a whole post, a fraction of a post, unless you consider a poem as something somewhat less than a full post, but then you’d be in some hot water with the poets. I wouldn’t want that for you. But, to be truthful, the 45 poems I’ve posted, 30 of which were composed one-a-day as part of National Poetry Writing Month in April, did enhance my numbers, productivity speaking. So, suffice it to say, I’m pleased with myself and I hope you are too–and to all of you who have made this blog site a regular stop of yours, I thank you from the very depths of my being.
Other than just to make a celebratory statement about my 100th blog entry, I’m not sure what to write about here. Perhaps I could just muse a little bit on the effect blogging has had on my life and on my writing. That might be good. Perhaps, I could talk about the pros and cons of blogging. At the very least, there may be some learning about the whole process that I could discover and then articulate for your reading pleasure, that is, if you find that kind of thing pleasurable. Let’s have a go at that, shall we?
Blogging has made me more productive. I’m a fiction writer, primarily, but I find that to write fiction, I need sustained amounts of time to immerse myself in the fictive dream, so to speak, sustained amounts of time that don’t occur for me on a regular basis–so my fiction composition is as slow as mud; it took me ten years to finish Monster Talk and probably another ten years before the start of that project to finish my first novel, the one that’s been sitting in a box on my desk now for the better part of the last decade, yeah, the one about Spontaneous Human Combustion. Outside of my fiction writing, before blog (B.B.) I’d find myself writing poems every once in a while, sometimes in flurries far and few between, and sometimes I’d write a little bit of something in the context of my teaching for my colleagues, and whenever I could I would write alongside my students. But never could I say, that over the course of a year or two, that I had “finished” 100 pieces. I’m still writing my fiction, slowly, I’m still doing odd writings here and there at work for colleagues and students, but on top of that, I have completed 100 blog entries. Perhaps, embarking on this endeavor, I have written more, finished more short pieces than I ever did B.B.
Blogging has widened my repertoire. I’ve written here essays about teaching, essays about parenting, essays about music, essays about writing, essays about fashion for crying out loud (thanks to Betabrand), autobiographical essays, cultural criticism essays, and blogs about blogging. And I’ve written poems about 45 different things. First off, my non-fiction output has shot up from no thing to 100 things! And secondly, none of those things are the things for which I think I am truly skilled and for which, as evidence of said skill, I have a piece of paper and a book! So blogging is helping me come into my own, I hope, as an essayist.
Blogging is spontaneous, improvisational in nature, at least it is for me, and that’s helpful because it has enabled me to explore things about which I have questions. I choose a blog topic simply by intuition. I’ve got lists here and there, but I don’t often refer back to them. Rather, an inspiration will hit, stick with me for a day, an hour, or a few minutes, and I kind of know right away, I get a kind of temperature, and if it’s hot, if it sticks with me, if it compels me to sit down and begin typing, I go for it. I rarely abandon a piece that I’ve started writing. So blogging has also brought me a level of commitment toward finishing the things I start. I appreciate that.
Are there any negatives in my blogging experience?
There’s a part of me that says ANY writing I do is a good use of my time. Writing is something I want to do, so if I’m doing it, that’s a good thing. But I have to ask myself, if all the time I devoted to creating blog entries over the last two years had been spent on fiction writing, how much further would I be toward the completion of a new novel–and wouldn’t that have been a BETTER use of my time? My gut response is to answer no to that question. When I think about the pleasure I have found in blogging coupled with the productivity and the way I feel like it’s broadened my writing, I am glad to have started the blog site and glad to have kept at it for two years. I wouldn’t want to undo that progress in exchange for a draft of a new novel. And what’s to stop me from blogging progress on the new novel? What’s to prevent me from blogging fiction?
Now this is a difficult and dicey proposition, one that I have explored a little bit in an entry I wrote after National Poetry Writing Month. There’s something scary and negative and offensive to me about drafting fiction in public. I’m not sure exactly why–but I kind of feel like it demeans it somehow, and I’m guessing real poets feel the same way about publishing poems on a blog site. I’m not sure I consider myself a real poet. No, that’s not true. I’m as real a poet as any other poet. Maybe it is that I have a different relationship to my poetry than I do with my fiction. My poetry is kind of offhand, not meticulously crafted, and doesn’t have behind it a piece of paper and a book. I know that and accept that about my poetry, so I’m not as guarded about it or as protective. And the comment earlier, that I’m not a real poet, is only an effort to honor those poets who are guarded and protective about their work, who feel like publishing their poetry in a blog post would somehow be demeaning or disrespectful to the work. I’d love to hear other writers’ takes on this. Ultimately, I think it’s all in my head. That’s the truth of it. And that leads to another potentially negative aspect of blogging. This stuff in my head, emerging, not quite perfectly formed, sometimes even faulty, frail, wrong–it’s all right here on my blog site.
Blogging has made me a kind of statistic blip addict. And that’s not a good thing. It’s something I want to work on–not being so needy about that. Part of the beauty and conversely the danger of blogging is the experience of instant publication and often instant feedback. How many visitors, likes, new followers, new comments, did that entry receive and what does it all mean? This is something bloggers should be interested in, I suppose, but not obsessing about. Only once have I obsessed–and it was terrible. Long after its original composition, a blog entry I wrote entitled “English Teacher Math: Teaching 200 Students How To Write” was posted and roasted on the Reddit social network site. It resulted in the busiest single day or two ever on my blog, and it resulted on Reddit in some pretty good conversation, some of it smart and helpful, but it also resulted in a number of absolute looney tunes posting comments after that blog entry on my site–all of which culminated in a near complete and total TIME SUCK in my life and in my head. You know, hatred from strangers will have a tendency to do that–unless you have developed a strategy for dealing with it, which I had not. I was a complete basket case for three days. I got over that, and I have never had a repeat performance. If another one comes up, I hope I will deal with it more effectively. Blogging should not be a stress producer–and I’m thankful to say that exactly 99% of the time it has not been!
So there you have it, for now. A meditation on my first 100 blog posts. If you got this far, I thank you. If you have been a regular visitor or a follower, I thank you. If you would purchase my novel Monster Talk, I would be forever grateful. It’s been a good trip, thus far. I think I will continue doing this thing. Cheers.
michael jarmer 