Or Not To Blog?

In which the blogger tries to explain to himself why he feels so baffled these days about the business of blogging, producing a piece which will surely have but the most selective of appeal. And so, for all that the blogger sincerely appreciates your presence, dear reader, good manners dictate that he warn you that perhaps another piece and indeed another blog might be more to your undoubted splendid taste than what follows;
 

   
1.

I really don’t want to give the wrong impression. I’m not looking for a shoulder to greet on, a sympathetic word, or a slap on the back and an up-and-at-'em pep talk.

It is, of course, possible to experience doubt without suffering despair, and, as full of doubt as I am, I’m certainly not despairing.

2.

Opportunities, opportunities.

   

3.

I started blogging, as I know I’ve said before, because I needed to sharpen my mind up again after a long period of  ill-health. As Iggy once said;

“Oh My, And, Boo Hoo.”

Bad things happen. They just do. I’m not whinging about that, I promise you. But all that Oh My and Boo Hoo is relevant to the matter at hand, and so I mention it here. But the bad things happened then, and now they don’t happen very much at all, and that makes everything fine.

   

4.

I knew why I ought to be blogging long before I was sure of what I was going to be blogging about. 

I knew that I needed to increase my mental stamina, to learn again how to simply concentrate, how to just get things done, as I once had, when such things had seemed so remarkably easy.

 

And I knew that I wanted to rediscover the ability to write too, the capacity to get my head down and produce at least, oh, five thousand words a week, and to have filtered those words, almost regardless of what they were saying, through at least a couple of drafts before they were published on one blog or the other; writing well was a project for the future, and of course it still is, but just to be writing again was the first and most centrally important issue.

I also very much wanted a sense of studying, if you will, a subject that I loved after twenty years of teaching a host of topics that I had very little immediate interest in.

  

And I knew that I ought to try to develop something of a thicker skin, because for all that no-one I’ve known has ever quite believed me, with the exception of the Splendid Wife of course, I really am a somewhat shy individual. Even the merest business of pressing the “publish” button, back when no-one at all knew that my blogs existed, always involved a measure of prevarication. I didn’t want to bother anyone, and I still don’t, but that way lies invisibility and inertia.

Even now, with a year’s practise behind me, and despite the anxiety-calming effect of the Statcounter reassuring me that very few people at all know I’m here today, pushing that button’s still something of trial.

Boo Hoo. Oh my.

   

5.

Blogging has been a splendid business for me.  

Quite by the chance good fortune generated by nothing more than a single-minded, if at times faint-hearted, perseverance, everything that I set out to achieve has, to my genuine and absolute astonishment, come about. The mind is sharper, the thin skin just that little bit thicker. Routine has hardened into habit and then become a pleasure. By the middle of last summer, I’d written more than a million words. Who knows how much more I’ve written since?

And yet, the problem with starting a blog with specific targets in mind is that one day the blogger might discover that they've all been fulfilled.

   

6.

Nothing has so deepened my sympathy for the opinions of others so much as the experience of looking on as my own arguments were being shredded elsewhere on the net. This was not an expected outcome of the exercise. But my writing hasn't always found, shall we say, universal acclaim even among the small numbers of folks who’ve chanced upon it. Boo hoo. I never expected that it would, of course, which was fortunate for me, but I never expected to watch a few folks here and there taking shots at it, and me. Time and time again, I’ve followed a Statcounter link to find my work being lacerated, and sometimes, and only sometimes, for words that I’ve never said, points that I’ve never made. Once, and I still don’t know if this counts as an amusing or a disconcerting experience, a creator who’d kindly pointed folks in the direction of a piece I’d written about their work was attacked by several of their own fans for doing so. (My piece was just plain wrong, you see, and the writer should have known their own work better.) Such a tiny blog, of course, and therefore and quite rightly, only a tiny response, but still, on occasion, a rather vehement one. Yet, how better to learn what far, far more substantial figures face every day, whether they open their mouth or they don’t, than to experience the least substantial fraction of an internetoblogosphere firestorm myself?

 

Very quickly I learned that to speak in public, as it were, was to loose control of how my words were understood. Much of that was because I hadn’t learned how careful a writer – even an amateur blogger – must be with their work. A great deal more, of course, was because I'd simply got some things quite wrong. Some of it was an ignorance of how debate occurs on the net. Whatever the sources of my naivety, I soon grasped that people can be upset and hurt in a host of ways I’d never really understood before. Of course, I'd known what it was to alienate friends, to fall out with lovers, to stand before a class that loathed me and would loathe me for months more until I’d managed to steer them towards the level of achievement which might cause them to forgive me and my expectations. But this was a different kind of vulnerability and it took time to adapt to it.

   

It has all been an exceptionally useful process for me, and I think that, inbetween the recurrent disappointment at the failings of my own efforts, I've had something of a great deal of fun too. Indeed, I've been so wrapped up in all this blogging that I didn’t notice how I’d somehow stumbled into the end-game of my original project. I’d hit all of those first four targets, you see, but I never noticed, because I'd forgotten what it was that I'd set out to achieve in the first place. For there were always other pleasures, other folks to talk to, other debates to tap into and grapple with, other unwieldy sentences to worry about, other collected editions to read, other comments to joust with, other pieces to finish and new ones to plan.

As the months passed and without my ever noticing, blogging became about something other than a project concerned with mental acuity and psychological hardiness. Instead, it became unexpectedly about people, and, of course, more and more about these strange and marvellous comic books, which became progressively more beguiling and impressive to me with every piece I researched and wrote and published.

Next!

  

7.

It hasn't helped my sense of purpose and perspective to discover how hospitable and kind the comicbook internetoblogosphere can be. My two blogs have been host to dozens of commenters who’ve been rational, gentle, respectful and bright. I’ve become distantly and faintly acquainted with a host of women and men I’d never otherwise have had the chance to swap words with. Folks in Canada, Ireland North and South, the Philippines , Russia, Japan, Austria, New Zealand, Finland, America, Spain, Holland, Denmark, Chile, The Ukraine, Belgium, India. People with blogs, people without, people with ideas quite invigoratingly different from mine, people who run Sequart Publishing and show me nothing but supportiveness, and even a few of the women and men who actually produce the comic books I’ve tried to write respectfully and honestly about. Folks with lives I’d never have crossed without these daft lil’blogs.

   

The conspicuous kindness shown by professional creators still shocks and surprises me. I recall being absolutely stunned to find myself exchanging the slightest of comments with people who, quite frankly  and even at the august age of 48, I still bear a considerable measure of hero worship towards. Is that shameful, to feel such a sense of unfashionable respect? I hope not. (Respect, if not deference, is surely always a good idea, the mores of the 21st century notwithstanding.) It's not as if I've ever let that respect get in the way of my being honest, no matter how uncomfortable I feel about such a policy. I’ve never written a word that I didn’t believe in, never avoided a negative comment just because of a faint chance that a creator might at some time or other chance upon my blog. Yet, when a writer, editor or artist has been generous, has left a link or made a supportive comment, it is even tougher than normal to make anything less than positive noises about their work. 

It’s not that I didn’t understand how criticism hurt before. Of course I understood that, just as I knew that, oh, rain never falls upwards,and there's no air on the Moon.

And yet, my understanding of the lack of a Lunar atmosphere would be undoubtedly sharpened if I were by the most unlikely of chances to find myself standing up there on the Sea Of Tranquillity, without a spacesuit.

    

8.

The first criticism that my blogs ever received came as a considerable surprise, both because I hadn’t realised that I’d enabled the comments, and because I’d never imagined that anyone had visited in the first place.

The comment spat at me for getting the spelling of the name of one of the trainee mutant Judges in an Al Ewing story wrong. Most of the comment is utterly lost to me now, but I keenly, keenly recall the last sentence;

“These things matter, dammit!”

Oh my.

  

9.

One of my blogs was a complete disaster in terms of visitors. No matter what I wrote, I couldn’t get many folks to visit “2000AD: ThatRemindsMeOfThis”. This was, of course, entirely my fault. Who else's fault could it have been? If I had written it better, more folks would have popped over, and then popped over again. I'd begun badly, managing to unintentionally alienate one group of potential visitors in several awkward ways, which I regret, and then proceeded to irritate several more folks with the manner in which I went about discussing aspects of social justice in several British comic books.

I received my favourite aggrieved comment in response to that last Quixotic series of posts; “I’ve not read the comics you’re discussing” it ran, “But I know you’re wrong.”

I deleted that long and quite often touchingly incoherent and rather nasty comment from the blog, but not before taking a copy of it for myself. Those were words to treasure, although treasuring the words of extremely angry commenters hadn't ever been on my radar when I'd first decided to blog.

  

10.

I hated stopping posting on my blog about 2000ad. I loved the comic and desperately wanted to find a way of kicking off a debate about a string of things about it that I thought were well worth the discussing.

Race. Gender. Sexuality. Ethnicity. Responsibilities to new and uncommitted readers. The investment of emotion into stories often more concerned which machismo than any more vulnerable aspects of human psychology.

I miss that other blog of mine still. I feel as if it were a pet that I failed to look after properly, that I let fade away for neglect and the lack of a good enough heart. You'd think that it'd been alive, a living thing to cherish rather than no more than a practical means for getting my thinking into better order.

I feel as if I’m forever guiltily retiring from writing this blog or that one, that column or this, as if I've been a thoroughly negligent blog owner. Worse yet and over time, it's as if my blogs have somehow become not just lost pets to me, but also not unlike places that I've in some fashion lived in, to be sentimentally recalled as I might remember an old family house or my first freezing student flat, full of the memories of a particular time and of all the people and dreams, disappointments and achievements, associated with it.

        

11.

I write this not because I imagine there’s a single person beyond myself who’d feel anything more than an atom of sadness in response to any possible passing of this blog. I do promise you, this is not written to tearfully explain the demise of a blog to an imagined audience supposedly about to implode with despair. I have never deluded myself that this has been anything other than a blog written entirely for my own interests, a profoundly selfish blog. What else could it be? It was, after all, begun for absolutely self-serving motives. That, to my astonishment and great pleasure, some good people turned up on occasion to read what has been written here has been a tremendous and unexpected privilege. It shouldn’t have mattered to me, of course, whether anyone visited or not, because I ought to be self-sufficient enough not to care if no-one’s listening at all. But it has mattered. I never could suppress a sense of gratitude and a tingle of some small measure of returning confidence inspired by the fact that every day saw some good and companionable people dropping over for a quick visit. How could that not be a heartening thing?

  

Several days ago, I noticed how the “Followers” total for this blog had advanced from 98 to 100 people. I shouldn’t have noticed that at all, I suppose, or, having done so, I should have thought instead of the seven billion people who haven’t yet signed up, and who of course never will.

I should have been entirely dispassionate about that figure of 100 Followers.

But I wasn’t. 

I very much appreciated the fact, for all that I knew it was a modest achievement, and far more a mark of other people's curiosity and kindness than of any achievement on my part.

I hadn't even known what a follower was until I was well into my first month of blogging. Followers hadn't ever been in the plan.

  

12.

Because the purpose of this blog was to assist me in my recovery, the form it took was all about that and nothing to do with being commercial, or entertaining, or academic, or indeed, any of the qualities that might be associated with a successful blog, however success might be measured. In truth, my blogs have always been a great sprawling, undisciplined mess, in that I've never recognised a specific format to follow and never thought of a particular audience at all, beyond hoping that whoever might pop over would find something to make their visit worthwhile. My approach was as functional as it was indulgent. I simply set out to write a great deal about a subject I loved and barely understood, while striving to ensure that whatever was posted here was, for all of its inevitable flaws and short-comings, well-considered and sincerely meant.

  

But there’s a limit to what can be done with with such a – shall we say – idiosyncratic approach. There’s certainly a limit to who might be interested in experiencing, and then re-experiencing, it. And in the past week, visits to the blog have indeed started to fall for the first time in seven months. It shouldn’t have mattered at all who does and who doesn’t pop over, but I found that it did. It wasn’t anything of a moment of crisis, but it did result in my mind turning to the thought of what it was that I was doing wrong.

And then, the metaphorical penny metaphorically dropped. For this blog wasn’t designed to attract visitors in the first place, and the fact that it has is an incredible bonus. The purpose of this blog was never meant to be the accumulation of readers. It wasn’t, and it couldn’t ever be, about maintaining and increasing a Statcounter rate.

If it were, well, I wouldn’t have started from here.

 

And that’s when I realised. This blog, and its poor dead sister, has by an accident of fate done all that I’d hoped it might. Miraculously, unbelievably, undeservedly. For just about the first time in my life, I’d built something which, albeit far more by luck than judgement, took me to where I’d intended to go, and to a great deal many more places too.

To my amazement, I discovered that I had already arrived at the destination which I'd believed myself to be still travelling towards. 

  
13.

I have no idea at all where I ought to go from here.

   

14.

I love comics, and I've loved writing about them. It’s a medium that I adore and one which I regret not making my own when I was considerably younger in years.

But the web is alive with babbling about comics, both babbling that's very fine indeed and babbling that's very much not, and I can’t say that I’m adding much if anything at all to that necessarily and splendidly disharmonious chorus. There's so very much of quality that's out there already.

15.

Confusion, after all, can be a extremely promising state to inhabit. There's always the possibility of change in a confused situation.

But it is disconcerting all the same.

Yet I really don’t want to give the wrong impression. I’m not looking for a shoulder to greet on, a sympathetic word, or a slap on the back and an up-and-at-‘em pep talk.

It is, of course, possible to experience doubt without suffering despair, and, as full of doubt as I am, I’m certainly not despairing.

 
16.

Ah, but comic books. Aren't they just the most fantastic way to tell a story?

.