Letter-blogging
Having been way too busy lately, between my current job and a sudden
reappearance of work from three years ago that’s been consuming my free time,
I have a big backlog of blog ideas, plus recent disturbing thoughts from Lori
and Seema. If you squint while you read this, you may even spot a
coherent theme.
From the November 2002 Analog, Niven’s First Law for Writers:
Writers who write for other writers should write letters.
The first thing I thought of when I saw that was, of course,
the fanfic potlatch, but maybe
LiveJournal is a better example. I’ve never cared for LiveJournal, not even
when I thought it was just another diaryland; I prefer blogs.
A blog is not a journal or a diary. It is not evidence of membership
in a particular clique. It is not a longwinded, scattered metafic forum. A blog is
just a weblog - links and thoughts of interest at least to the writer, possibly to
passing readers. A blog is asynchronous.
Blogging shouldn’t be work. Fandom is too much work already - why take
on yet another job? Blogging shouldn’t be a misplaced mailing list, forum, or
newsgroup, if only because clicking around the net after the next comment is
far more inconvenient than reading mail or news, and slightly more
inconvenient than a forum or bulletin board.
I’ve always been against work in fandom, all the little and big ways we
make this all so much harder than it should be. I’ve railed against
fic taxes from the
beginning, and I bring my tax evasion with me when I blog. I don’t do the
blog rounds. I read a few blogs that I find interesting (see right column
or the main page if you’re coming from the
archives), and if those known interesting people mention something intriguing,
I’ll follow the link. Otherwise, I just surf around when I have the time.
The latest addition to my blog list is Alara Rogers; I added her not because
I know her, or am fishing for a blog potlatch return link, but because on the
rare occasions I get sucked into reading a LiveJournal-based metafic thread,
I seem to end up on her site, like her points, and think, “oh, yeah, Alara
Rogers has a blog.” It’s not a social thing. If I want a social thing, I can open
my inbox, which my list full of chatty C/7 fans seems determined to keep
stuffed.
So it’s impossible for me to get tired of blogging. It’s just me thinking
aloud here, and how could I get tired of thinking? Blogging is asynchronous, so
I can blog as little or as much as I want. I do it nearly daily because I enjoy
certain kinds of writing. One kind is writing fic, but the other kind is writing
letters. Email isn’t really like pen-and-paper letter-writing - it’s not
asynchronous enough. Emails are too full of quoted material and background
context to stand on their
own. They’re too instantaneous to require the style of writing that re as it
goes, that makes its own freestanding argument. Emails have no ink.
Blogger was kind enough to give me back the pen-and-paper approach
to writing, but with a larger potential audience. So I blog like I used to write
letters in the days before most people had email - to amuse, at a distance,
in a coherent and freestanding way.
The more communal and comment-centric LiveJournal gets, the further it
drifts from asynchronous writing and into dialogue. Dialogue, in fandom, turns
to meta, or at least show-chat. Dialogue means if no one comments,
no one cares.
Letter-writing, on the other hand, is prone to long silences which do not
reflect badly on the writer. You post a blog entry, and you get a few
other people’s blog entries that day, asynchronously, on random topics they
thought might interest you. Comments are beside the point in letter-blogging.
It’s all a matter of perspective. Fandom can only chew you up and spit
you out if you let it. If you’re careful not to pay unnecessary, self-defeating,
time-stealing and fic-quenching taxes, you may survive to write again. If you
do, write me a letter and tell me about it.