I just can't help myself. I've got books piled high in some strange places right now - why I bought another, I'm not sure but I was picking up some vegetables last night (oh yeah - look at me knocking up real food from scratch) and I spotted Christopher Ransom's new release - The Fading. His previous: The Birthing House, The People Next Door and The Haunting of James Hastings (which has had it's name changed in the US to rather inferior Killing Ghost), have all been great reads. If you're in the mood for a skin crawler that's pretty much guaranteed to make the grade, The Fading is out on general release now.
Ransom has a semi-blog here where he says that he should probably have a blog but nobody can surely be really interested, thus the 'blog' is disguised as 'news'. Looks like a blog to me though! In fact, what he actually said was this:
I really should have a blog or something more frquent to contribute to. You know, so that you will come back here again and again and I will become a fire brand in your brain and you will never, ever forget to buy my books. But then, if my books are earning that loyalty on their own, I'm pretty much sunk, aren't I? And I don't think I have all that much interesting to say that doesn't get fed one way or another into my books. Do any of you really want to read about what cute thing my dog just did today? So you care what my politics are? Where I had lunch today?
Probably not.
Or maybe some of you do, but still. I can't help feeling like such "blog" entries are a waste of my time and yours. There are enough opinions out there for people to gorge themselves on for a couple centuries, most of it about as nutritious as pre-digested celery. You need more opinions shoved down your throat like I need another spam voice mail to my cell phone. Right?
To put it another way, when I was growing up we didn't have blogs, and my favorite authors didn't blog, and I didn't miss hearing more about their personal lives, at least not unless it had to do with how such personal things helped them become a writer or how it influenced their work. My heroes didn't opine on the latest trends, celebrity divorce, or failed legislation. They just quietly went about writing novels, year after year.
When people whose work I like say things like this, I wonder exactly why I blog. What are we now? Four years into it perhaps. Maybe more. There's not much of real-value on here that, if something big happened, anybody could possibly be interested in. Sometimes I feel like I could flick the switch on it tomorrow and it wouldn't make any difference to anything - and it wouldn't.The key phrase in Ransom's statement for me is "I can't help feeling like such "blog" entries are a waste of my time and yours." Ouch. That smarts a bit because it's got more than a few grains of truth in it.
It takes a lot of time and effort to blog consistently - and I will be the first to admit that the subject matter has veered around here more than I would have liked. They - the 'experts', that is - say that a successful blog is 'about something'. Sorry. Can't do that. There's too much life in the world to talk about just one thing. Too many great things to find and discover to confine yourself to one single focus. Experts tend to define 'success' as 'money' anyway and that's not always the purpose of something is it.
That's a really tough decision - shut down blog and spend more time writing proper things - or continue as normal?
After I posted the Lulu comments yesterday, I carried it around with me all day thinking that I had been harsh quite unintentionally - well, anybody who happened to pay attention to it. After all - who the hell am I to be preaching to the world? But I still think it's true. If you're going to do everything yourself with your story, why would you want it to look as though you had only spent five minutes on it? The extension of that for me though was, does it really matter, if thousands and thousands find themselves reading your book? Surely that's the important thing?
Hmm. Somehow it seems like going to work in your pyjamas to me...