Blogger Shmogler
Why it’s easier to write an 80,000 word novel than a weekly 800 word blog.
After my last post my friend Amy who’s known me since we were Freshmen at URI, said that she always felt like Blogging was like writing letters to friends. She should know, she’s done both and a lot better than me. In some ways there’s some truth to that as I know a number of my friends read these. In other ways it’s a little weird to just throw my thoughts and musings out to the internet once a week.
It might seem odd that a guy who writes books might not want to write a blog. Writing’s, writing, right? It is and it isn’t. Writing a novel is fun. It’s like watching a movie, really, really slowly, while you script it, direct it and film it. Writing novels, I have the benefit of entertaining myself while I’m working. I have added incentives to write novels in the form of my Agent Cynthia, deadlines and the occasional royalty check. The other nice thing about novels is that they aren’t about me. People read them because they like Andy Roark. They want to reconnect with him, the fictional character, who is by design a hell of a lot more interesting than me.
Blogging is different. It’s not about some fictional tough guy from Boston. It’s about me. It’s a random assortment of my thoughts that I hurl out to the universe via Substack and the rest of the internet. It goes out there and then I spend the next week obsessively looking at the stats on Substack. “Did this week’s random musings get more views than last week?” “Did I get anymore subscribers?” Those types of questions start creeping into my brain.
As I spend entirely too much of my life pouring over the stats page I start to wonder. “Should I write more about Veterans stuff?” “Should I writer about being a cop.” I tend to not do either, no matter how interesting my careers have been there’s always someone like Jack Carr out there who’s a legitimate badass. I, like most of you, would much rather read the war stories of a Navy Seal than a Reserve Civil Affairs officer. That’s an easy bet.
I haven’t yet succumbed to posting about my lunch. Sometimes I wonder if I should throw in a picture of a kitten or a puppy. Those are always good for getting hits. But then I might have to blogging solely about kittens and that might take me to an entirely different demographic. A place I don’t want to go.
With tough guy novels it’s simple, there’s a kind of formula. It helps if somewhere in it there is a “dark and stormy night”. There should be a woman, preferably an attractive one, maybe the type to have small pistol in her stocking top. Maybe she’s a femme fatale or maybe she’s true blue. There should be tough villains, throw in a fist fight and a gun fight and now you’re cooking. Make sure the hero overcomes some sort of struggle, almost loses and wrap it up in 230-40 pages. Bang, you’ve got a tough guy, detective novel.
Blogging is 4-800 words per post. At least once a week. No fiction please. Tell us about your boring life. No one wants to read about my being stuck in traffic during my morning commute. No one wants to see my posts about my favorite grilled cheese. Cheddar and American cheese with bacon. Or my titanic struggled with the caked-on food that I had to scrub off a plate before loading the dishwasher. I can’t blame them; I don’t even want to read about it. Ah, the glamorous life of a little-known author of fiction.
The truth of it is that I am actually a pretty private person, which makes this all the harder. That’s one of the advantages of fiction, it’s not real. The problem with the blog is that it has to be grounded in some sort of reality. It requires some sort of inspiration, and that inspiration has to arrive every Thursday (the day I arbitrarily dedicated to this). But that inspiration does somehow strike, and I dash off a letter to friends and strangers alike.
What’s gratifying is that a bunch of you read them. Even more gratifying is that some of you write back. I get emails from old friends from college like Amy. Or comments on my social media accounts. Occasionally people I’ve never met will reach out to me and that’s pretty cool. For now, I guess I don’t have to go hunting for kitten and puppy pictures.