Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Purpose?




The Point Is To Write



I find I did not stop writing after Net4TV Voice stopped publishing. I was writing in alt.discuss groups, usenet for MSNTV users only. These posts are automatically purged from the system after 30 days. I would try to save some by emailing them to myself, but I usually forgot.




I'm blogging to get myself back in the habit of writing publicly on a regular basis.



I site track, to see which ISPs are visiting and how long they stay. I don't know identities of individual viewers.



Blogging can be just about anything that particular blogger wants it to be. I've only begun to take blogging seriously as a medium, and am finding my way. I'll find my direction as I go.



One thing I'm already noticing is that, while topics may be different, the stories are growing parallel to other topics. A book, conventional journal, etc progresses in a more linear fashion: the author must either include all tangential info in the body of work or edit out what isn't relevent to the topic.



By blogging, I have eliminated this need to either crowd or cull. I can write as much as I want about an issue in one blog, and still have information about that issue in another blog, from a different perspective.



I get caught up in journalism-style writing: stick to the "lead." This has meant I edit out a lot of the decorations and clutter of real life. Makes the story easier to read, but it's sparse, antiseptic, unreal.



Real life is messy. It doesn't conform to a plot- or time-line preimposed on it. Life meanders, dawdles, pokes, stalls, races, switches directions and ambles in concentric circles.



I think blogging could more accurately represent that. Blogging could be more of a "web" like medium: radiating out from a center, connected but not the same. The center of the web is my: life, ego, experience and need to communicate. I'm the spider; the readers are the flies (sorry). I'm more likely to "catch" one if I broadcast from different directions and angles.



Broadcast: casting broadly. Why confine my writing? I don't know where I'm going; I'm simply trying to write regularly and as honestly as I know how. I won't know, until some patterns and directions emerge, where this is going! Why confine it to a single direction or purpose? That would doom it from the start.