On blogging...

[Dianne Day]

I have a personal blog, on the Google blog site, but I'm not going to keep it up. I'll be removing the link from my personal page here on Crimespace soon, end of this month.

Blogging is weird. Not so much here, where the focus is mystery and I have some credentials and a lot of history in the field; once in a while I do seem to have something to say that's probably worth saying. But in general I am not a good blogger. I do like to read some other people's blogs, and there are some I'm in awe of -- Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, for one. But when it comes to keeping one up myself, I dunno. It felt too much like an ego trip to me, putting my own thoughts about this and that on the internet. The whole time I'd be writing the few entries I put on my Compassionate Curmudgeon site, I felt like Who the Heck Cares? Other than myself, of course.

When I started the Curmudgeon site, it was with the idea that it would be good discipline for me to write coherently about the things that were concerning me at the moment. And I suppose it was. Also there's the fact that I live now in a relatively isolated place, a blue collar town I moved to 6 years ago, late in my life, and I haven't found a good physical place to just hang out and blather with people here about the things I was putting in my blog.

But, when I got that far with trying to figure out why I was uncomfortable with my own blog, I had the Aha! moment. My problem is I'm a much better dialoguer than monologer. (Monologuer? Hmm.) What I'm missing is that place to hang out and blather -- but I do have the internet where I can hang out. I like the internet more for the connectedness it encourages, than for the solipsism that's also a possibility. And I don't think internet connectedness is an illusion, though there could be some debate from psychologists on that.

Speaking of psychologists (and then I'll shut up), another place I post regularly now besides Crimespace is Salon.com. I did the ego-testing thing of clicking on a link there to read my own posts, as other people can do, and I winced. In several posts I'd given bits of my background, by way of explaining what gave me the right to the opinion I was about to express, and when those posts were all together in one place it became damn embarrassing. I've done so many different things in my life, out of necessity, before I finally took the big leap to do what I always wanted to do, write, that I sounded to my own ears either like a braggart or a liar. For the record, I really do have a couple of master's degrees and have worked professionally in psychology as a psychotherapist at the master's level, and then as an administrator in a hospital and a retirement community, before I left the professions to write. And left all that behind gladly. Nevertheless I had embarassed myself so much by mentioning those things that I wanted to go hide. Fortunately it's easy to hide on the internet; I just didn't post again until I'd recovered. Meanwhile I noticed nobody else seems to feel the need to say what gives them the right to have a strong opinion, they just have them and post them, and that's all there is to that. So what IS my problem? Damned if I know exactly but it's too late to change..

Therefore and regardless, I'm happy to blog here about mysteries, but my personal blog is not continuing past May 31st, and now you know why.

-- Dianne Day

[Dianne Day]

Lesa, I seem to have made your post disappear by moving my cursor to the end of it, thinking it was continuing and I needed to scroll it down. I'm sorry, and want you to know I appreciated your kind words.