And do you know what I discovered? I am NOT God's gift to the internet! There are some people out there who are just as amusing as I am—and a few who are even more so! There are *many* people who lead more interesting lives, so they're starting out with an advantage over me in terms of content…[Editor's note: Here I had initially typed "No one so far writes better than I do, so I guess that's reassuring, but still!" After leaving this post to steep for a few days of reflection, I decided that not only was this assessment of my compositional skills a bit generous, but it was basically a complete denial of the truth.] My only real consulation was that no one had the interesting, touching human-interest stories that I do. Actually, that isn't so much of a consulation, because my "touching human interest" pieces are usually born out of pain spawned by the death of a relative…so basically my Chinese New Year holiday went from lazy and leisurely to dismal and depressing in about the same about of time it takes to click a mouse button.
To make matters and my jealousy worse, I found out that two of the writers of these newly discovered blogs actually quit their day jobs and are subsisting entirely off the add revenues and royalties from blogging. One of them left a highly lucrative position at a viciously competitive law firm! Through some modern alchemy, the web is being used as the lapis philosophorum turning blogs into book deals for more than one of the lucky bastards I've been reading lately. Someone please tell me where the line is for this gravy train!!!
Anyway, after several bouts of alternately moping and crying out to the gods for denying me a greater natural aptitude for prose, I decided to use this odious epiphany as the impetus for me to step up my game. Speaking of improving my writing, I am still waiting to hear back from USC's Masters of Professional Writing Program. If I don't get in, basically I have virtually *no* plans for my future, so I've got my fingers crossed. (What am I to make of myself without a debt burden of $30,000 after two years?)
If I learned anything from these other wizards, it's that the really successful blogs center around some grand, unifying theme, or GUT.* For example if I wanted to emulate the GUTs of some of the blogs I've been reading, I could: become a waiter and continue in that trade into my late 30s at a posh New York bistro; become gay and move to South Korea; become a lawyer at a high stress law office, then quit to write full time; become a woman raised Mormon in the South, move to L.A., abandon the Latter Day Saints, get married, have baby, and move to Salt Lake City where all my Mormon neighbors revile me for my apostasy. I gave it some thought, and becoming either gay or female is a deal breaker as far as things I'd be willing to do to blog professionally are concerned. That left either three hellish years of law school and $100,000 in student loans or moving to the Big Apple to waiter for over a decade—both relatively uninviting. I guess I'll have to find my own way to make it big. (Of course, developing a niche or gimicky theme is no substitute for solid prose.)
* * * * * * * * * *
Confession time: my first impulse was to withhold the names and addresses of the blogs I've been reading. Let's face it, these people already get hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of hits a day. The waitering blog sometimes has upwards of 500 comments on a single entry; I shutter to think how many readers there are who read him and don't bother to comment. The ex-Mormon in Utah has such a large following, whose comment flux is so prodigious, that she has developed an 11 point comment policy, from which I have excerpted parts six and nine:
(f) Comments can be deleted or rejected at any time, for any reason or for no reason at all, just because I said so...
(i) A comment thread will most likely be closed within two days. Once a comment thread is closed it will not be re-opened and I will not honor any email requests to re-open it. For real.
As you can see, it's not as though I need to send any more readers their way, especially if that means I'm sending away my own followers, whom I can probably count on two hands. If anything, they should be linking my site to give me a little help. And let's face it, if I give out the links, you will more likely than not click on at least one of these other bloggers, and because they're good, you might even become a regular. Eventually your schedule is going to get busy (you can't spend your whole day at work surfing the internet without getting caught and/or eventually getting fired), so you have to be selective, and that means you'll be forced to choose between my competitors and me. There's a chance I could win that battle, but there's also a good chance I could lose, and I really can't afford that.
But withholding good things from you isn't going to make me any popular, so I figured I'll be noble and give some of think links below. Please remember that it was I who so altruistically introduced you to the competition; don't forget about me and my magnanimity. I'm not saying you have to love me as much as you love them. Just remember to drop by from time to time. And don't forget to write.
Dooce
Waiter Rant
Go Fug Yourself
Opinionistas
Power Line
*No relation to the "Grand Unifying Theory," also a.k.a. "GUT," which seeks to find a connection among the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnitism, strong force, and weak force), and ultimately to reduce them to and relate them by a single equation, similar to the treatment of electricity and magnatism in the 19th century.
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