A Year In Blogging

Or nine months, to be more precise, as I began this blog on the 2nd April, without the slightest idea of how important it would become to me. 226 posts, 2,065 comments and over 10,000 spam later, I can only marvel at the way the noble art of blogging has taken over my life. This is my inevitably insufficent attempt to make some sense of the experience.

I’d longed for a blog for over a year, but had never known how to get one, and it wasn’t until my husband saw a recommendation for wordpress in a computer magazine that I got started. The blog arrived in my life at a propitious moment; I’d been off work for six months with exhaustion and was beginning to pull my mind out of its slough of inactivity. I needed distraction, but as anyone who has suffered a long-term illness knows, distraction that can take you out of yourself without being itself exhausting is pretty hard to come by. The blog was perfect, because I could write as much or as little as I chose, I could do it when I wanted to, and I could express myself under the cover of a perfect anonymity. I didn’t tell anyone about it at first because I had no idea what I would want to write. I thought it quite possible that I should produce maundering passages of self-pity that dwelt on my illness and the muddled, labyrinthine processes that had caused it; I might have wanted to curse the university and my evil stars, but it turned out that all I really wanted to do was write about books. Now I look back to those early entries, and I do notice that their main difference is that they are much shorter than the ones I write today; not surprising at all, given that I really am hopelessly verbose once I get going.

However, I was entirely ignorant of the blogworld, and had no clue about netiquette. To begin with it was very hard to find any book blogs at all – there are certainly very few based in the UK. I spent hours traversing a sea of techno-geekery with barely a life buoy of aesthetics in sight. Then, when I began to come across a few here and there, I didn’t understand how one got to know the blogger in question. I once called the blogworld an immense party, and if there’s something I’m congenitally bad at, it’s introducing myself to strangers at a party. I left comments, but never seemed to get reciprocal visits (and probably didn’t know enough to return to the comment forum to see if the blogger had replied there), and to this day I feel uncertain about my welcome at a site where a comment I’ve left hasn’t produced an answering (and visiting) response. But I was starting to know people, and in those early days, the delightful Nils was my first real blogbuddy, showing to me how intoxicating those conversations with other bloggers could be, and helping me out technically in the process.

It was late spring before I found my way to the heart of the book bloggers, via Dorothy and Stefanie, both wonderfully generous reciprocators, as anyone who visits them knows. Then everything seemed to take off at once. I wonder if there is anything as exciting to a blogger as those days when your audience suddenly expands and the thrill of real conversations start to take place in the aftermath of a post. For me, blogging would be nowhere near as interesting and engaging without those discussions. I felt that I had entered a period of intense infatuation with my blog; I nurtured it and cared for it and devoted the very best of my time and attention to it. The day passed in a series of illuminated stepping stones, between deciding what to post, writing the post, and responding to blogger’s comments. My mother-in-law once intimated to me that I would be a terrible person to have in a book group; I can’t say for sure what she meant by this, but I think she was suggesting that I would either intimidate people, being an academic, or bore them, for the same reason. What I loved about blogging was that I could have these great discussions with other people about books that didn’t descend into academic nitpicking (I have enough of that at work) and yet were informed and insightful and packed with vitality. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; literature and the enjoyment it can offer people has been sectioned off into a ghetto for too long, and branded uselessly as elitist. If there’s any place where reconnecting with the simple and egalitarian pleasures of reading is possible, it’s here in the blogworld.

Indeed, the greatest surprise about blogging has been the extent to which it has reinvigorated my own reading. I’d bought fiction for a while in a major bookstore, I’d worked in a book printers, I’d spent the rest of my adult life studying European literature and I rather thought I knew what was out there to read. In fact barely a day passes without a blogger (probably Danielle) coming up with another tempting literary morsel that I’ve never heard of before. The reading challenges are also a brilliant way to make you actually fetch the books off the shelves that you’ve been intending to read for ages but never quite getting to. Be prepared, innocent reader who enters the blogosphere: it’s an Aladdin’s cave of publishing gems that you’ll not escape from with your bank balance intact.

Over the autumn that early passion I’d felt for the blog matured out into something a little less panicky and a little more steadfast; I felt able to take a break from posting every now and then, and even posted every other day when I was at a tricky point in my research. I soon discovered that wasn’t my natural rhythm, and that’s another thing blogs are subtly excellent at doing: they teach you all kinds of things you never realised about the way you write. Reading other people’s posts and watching their development, struggling through the mire of self-expression yourself, having the space and the courage to try new approaches and to attempt that difficult mix of the personal and the general makes blogging an extraordinary exercise in self-controlled pedagogy. By the end of this year I was contemplating something I had longed to do for many years but never known how to begin, and that’s write a non-academic book. I would never have reached this point had it not been for the support and encouragement (both direct and by example) of other bloggers, and it won’t be written without it, either. You have been warned!

What particularly intrigues me about blogging is its dynamism; that’s to say, writing here rarely ever stays still. There’s always some kind of development taking place into new arenas of thought – all those bloggers who were courageous enough to try the novel in a month know that it has had a profound impact on their posting. For me, the next challenge will be simply to decide where to go with this blog over the course of the year. It’s been the best fun building it up, but can I manage to maintain it and keep my audience entertained? And write a research book and a non-fiction book at the same time? I can only answer those doubts with a resounding: I certainly hope so! You set a great example to me out there, and I’ll be doing my best to follow it.