Diary of a Mad Editor

Recently, (just this morning) I was reading a post by Catana over at the blog, Capturing Chaos in which she was lamenting that blogging, for her, was a “guilt-ridden process.” I thought, while reading her post, that I knew exactly how she felt. I, too, have often felt a little ambivalent about blogging. Despite the fact that I’ve been blogging for almost a decade, I’ve really only come out of the closet as a blogger in the last year or so. Prior to that, it was just so uncool to tell my other writer friends that I was a blogger.

Perhaps I should explain: I started out writing fiction and poetry ( I still write fiction and poetry). Literary writers tend to look down on all other forms of writing with utter disdain. It’s in our blood. And let’s be honest, shall we: blogging isn’t real writing — it’s psuedo-writing. Of all the things I’ve written in my life, blog posts are arguably the easiest for me to do. I could blog in my sleep, blindfolded and hog-tied. After so many years, this blog practically writes itself. Hell, some days I wake up and see a new post and don’t even remember writing it. So most days, I feel like I’m cheating. Cheating readers and selling my own abilities short in the process. Yet, this other part of me loves doing it — loves the feeling of my fingertips punching the keys and the blissful feeling of progression. Progression of thought. Progression of words. But it’s a bittersweet feeling. Because when I’m blogging, I’m not writing for real (or at least, that snooty literary writer who lives inside me doesn’t think so). I’m not writing stories or poems or even essays in the proper sense. I’m venting and bloviating and opining and disiminating infomation by some form of ego-genesis. It’s not writing — it’s what passes for writing in the post-literate world. That I do it better than a lot of bloggers may make me an above average blogger, but it doesn’t make me a better writer. It doesn’t help me achieve my creative goals. So I feel that sense of guilt and urgency too, like Catana and other who may not be willing to admit it. I sometimes feel as if I’m blogging myself out of existence. That John the Blogger will destroy John the Writer.

I think a lot of this is due to the fact that I’m of a generation that still remembers a time before personal computers and the Internet and blogs. I am among the last of my kind and so I cannot help but have a love-hate relationship with blogs. I cannot help but feel like a traitor from time to time.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t see a time when I will give up blogging. The genie is out of the bottle and there is no re-corking it. But I sometimes do wish otherwise.