Blog for Blog’s Sake!

I don’t mind admitting that I have become rather attached to this blog, and to writing it, and to monitoring who’s reading it, and how many of you are visiting, and which blogs you are choosing to read.

I didn’t know that this would happen.

I began the blog as a sort of publicity exercise. Lots of people seemed to be writing pretty successful blogs, and lots of them seemed to be getting pretty decent attention for the stuff they were talking about in their blogs.

I didn’t start writing a blog until I felt as if I had something to write about, and that happened when I found out that I’d been shortlisted for the inaugural Mslexia novel writing prize back in February of this year. At that point, starting the blog finally seemed like a worthwhile exercise. I decided that, at least while I got the thing underway, I would write a short blog every day, about my experiences with the competition and the novel I had written for it. I thought there’d be enough material to keep me going for a little while, and, indeed there was.

Of course, I had no way to know where the thing would take me, and almost three hundred blogs later, I had no idea how much I’d enjoy writing the blogs or how diverse or, in some cases, how personal they would become.

There will be another blog about “Naming Names” before very long, possibly to mark a year since this blogging journey began, but, as I approach the end of my first year as a blogger it feels more like the start of something than the culmination.

There are more interesting and better bloggers on the internet. There are bloggers who write more eloquently, more personally, more professionally and more consistently than I will ever manage to do. Catch me on a good day and you might get a coherent argument or a complete thought about life or writing; catch me on a less good day and you might only get a thorough-going snark about something entirely trivial. I’m not going to begin to suggest which of those two blogs you might prefer to read, and I would never suggest that my wonderful little band of loyal readers might, for a moment, be fickle.

I will just say that all the time the stats keep ticking over and people keep coming to read my thoughts, I will keep posting them, and I shall probably keep posting them even after the last of you has stopped visiting, because sitting down to record a thought is terribly therapeutic, and now that I’ve begun, it’s quickly become a habit, a little ritual that I perform at the beginning of almost every day.

So, pretty much come what may, I’ll be back, probably tomorrow, and I hope that you’ll come back from time to time, too.