Thoughts on a Blog

It's been over two years since I started this blog.

Wow.

• I started this blog because I was writing a book, and my brother was having a house-wide nerf gun fight. I had long been a fan of Shannon Hale's blog, had recently seen Julie & Julia, and I figured that someday I would be as famous as Shannon Hale, and wouldn't it be nice to be able to look back and see what it was actually like {read: nerf war endurance} to write a book. So I started this blog. I had no idea that I wasn't the first to come up with this life-of-an-aspiring-author blog idea.
• I gained a couple of followers through NarniaWeb, and that was awesome. But it wasn't until I discovered Elana Johnson's blog--and thus a host of other awesome writer bloggers--through {I think} QueryTracker that I started following people. And lo and behold, they started following me back. I'm still stunned, actually.
• Then people commented. They commented with encouraging things and "I've been there, don't give up!" comments. And I realized that with real live followers actually counting me, I couldn't stop. I am not exaggerating when I say that without this blog, I don't know if I would still have a dream of being a professional author.
• One thing that makes me happy is that I never started this blog as a platform. I know people do, and I do not have a problem with that at all--I read those blogs, and I adore them--but I didn't begin this blog hoping it would ever gain me anything except a record of my writing adventure.
• At one point in my blogging process--when I was querying Stratagem--I got obsessive about making my posts super professional and platform-worthy. Soon I realized that I didn't have time to write a blog that wasn't truly me. So I reverted back to me, and subsequently missed lots of blogging days. But I've adjusted, and this time when I sent out Those Who Trespass, I didn't include my blog link in the query. Not because I think the blog is bad publicity. But my blog is not a platform. It's not meant to be a performance. It's just a blog. It's really nothing more than that.

I think those are all my thoughts. Yay for bullet points and bolded words, because if I were you reading this post, that's pretty much all I would retain.


One last blogging note: You may have noticed that 1) I've become a much steadier blogger than I was several months ago, and 2) I'm officially only blogging Mon-Thurs. Just an FYI.

Funny that my blogiversary is so close to my birthday. I'm twenty-one this month. I'm not sure what this means, although I think it implies I should really, really get my driver's license soon. {No, really, I'm attempting my license again in the next couple of weeks. And yes, I'll let you know when I get it. That's almost as big as publishing deal news, in my world.}