On Blogging

It's my anniversary. I made this little blog and started posting a year ago today.

Years ago, I'd created a tiny website, for my own amusement and because Earthlink offered them up for free. And I posted a picture of the cats and a picture of W. wearing the family wig and a picture of myself lying on the couch with cucumbers on my eyes and a cat on my stomach, and I called it a day.

When Miss M. was born, I started it up again, and posted pictures of her and some other weird stuff that I wanted to share. And then we moved and Earthlink simply could not get it together to get our DSL service working so we up and switched to Verizon thank you very much. And my tiny website disappeared.

But I kept collecting oddities "for the website". And so finally last summer, in a stretch of glorious free time while my office was being renovated and I therefore got to stay home for most of July, I created this blog. The first post was something that had been kicking around my desk for two years. Finally, or again, I had an outlet for all the bits (bytes?) floating about in my head and on little scraps of paper scattered hither and yon.

Back in May, the Blogrhet women issued a sort-of meme, in the form of four questions about one's blogging experience:

1. Go back to first or early post. How would you describe your voice back in those early days? Who were you writing to? What was your sense of audience (if any) back then?
2. Do you remember when you received your first comment? What was it like?
3. Can you point to a stage where you began to feel that your blog might be part of a conversation? Where you might be part of a larger community of interacting writers?
4. Do you think that this sense of audience or community might have affected the way you began to write?

I didn't start this to become a part of a community - but it has sort of, slowly, happened anyway. At first, the only person reading was my sister. In November, I participated in Fussy's NaBloPoMo - and made 45 posts in 30 days - and I started getting some readers and some comments. But things didn't really gel until about six months ago - though I can't for the life of me say why. Starting in about February, nearly every post would get at least a few comments. And while I'm not writing for an audience, I often sense - as word hits paper - which posts may attract comments from which readers. And those readers, I read them too. And I find them reading the same people I'm reading. The other day, I was working my way through my Bloglines list, and found that I was commenting just after the same person each time...it was like I was following her around in real time. And the people? I've come to know some of them off-blog, through back channel emails. It's like my circle of friends got bigger, in a mysterious way.

When I first embarked on infertility treatment, I perused the internet for information and fell into support. Through some boards, I ended up meeting other women - in person, on the phone, by email - and I'm still in touch with many of them. Blogs weren't part of that equation, but I can see how they could have been.

But now, it's my place to scribble thoughts, remember toddlerisms, share recipes and collect the odd whimsy that floats past on the sidewalk or in the pages of the Times.