I’d been blogging two or three times a week for about a year and a half, mostly social and political commentary. Sometimes I was pretty good, other times rather lame. I’d say I was a minor blip on the blogging screen with several thousand hits a month, depending on how much commentary and other interaction I did in the comments sections of related articles and other blogs.
One of the main features I became aware of was the number of hats a blogger wears: idea generator, researcher, author, editor, marketer, self-critic. Then I started thinking about veering away from my blog as commentary and doing something untried, approaching blogging from a different angle. What if I created a blog about blogging, a pulling back of the curtain to reveal what really goes into a blog, kind of a reality-blog show? That sounded promising. . .until I actually thought about the content. If I were going to be truthful about how I blogged and included all the steps leading up to a posting, that would probably be a contestant for the “Worlds Mostly Boring Blogs” contest: Woke up, checked Huffington Post. Saw article about latest Obama birth certificate rumor.
Beyond boring. No, a blog about blogging, at least for me, would never be launched into the blogosphere.
I went back to commentary on contemporary issues. Until a night in August. (I wrote most of my entries in the quiet of night.) I was casting about for a topic when (and I need a leap of faith on your part here) unexpected words entered my mind and flowed through my fingers onto the keyboard. Here is the original text:
Break time: Guest bloggers coming your way!
Blogging can be taxing! After months of facing the daily pressure to perform, I'm taking a week, maybe two, off from blogging to pursue non-electronic forms of entertainment, relaxation, and procrastination. And discovery, both inner and outer. Truth be told, I need to figure out why page views seem to have peaked and are now beginning to decline. Not to mention, most of my visitors seem to be from former Soviet republics. Have I in some way peaked in my own life? And in a larger sense, if I were to really stop blogging, what would become of me?
On a more immediate front, to keep the pages fresh, a bevy of young Guest Bloggers I found on Craig's List have signed on to keep you in the know.
Stay tuned.
The “I” in the above posting was not me, the me sitting at my desk, in my house, in Seattle. It was a different voice, a character (who turned out to be Isaac). This other character, not me, was burned out and about to go on sabbatical and end up in Polynesia. Who these new bloggers were, I didn’t know. What they were up to, I didn’t know. From this moment on, the blog took on a life of its own. Thinking Out Loud became the novel Thinks Out Loud, a blog at first.
More at: thinksoutloud.com
SPECIAL NOTE ABOUT THE BOOK AND AMAZON: If you order Thinks Out Loud from Amazon Prime, you will be receiving an older version that is out of date and whose printing is lighter than the current edition. If on Amazon, order from the Thinks Out Loud option which will be the newer better print version. You can also order the newer version directly from the publisher via this website, thinksoutloud.com, or from your local bookstore, which will either have the book in stock or available via a quick special order from Ingram, the wholesaler.