How To Blog
With yesterday’s post being more personal and emotional than most on this blog, I’ve been trying to sort out what exactly I’m doing with this parcel of internet space.
The most obvious reason to have a blog, as an author, is to simply own the space, make sure you’re the first google result, and give people something to look at if they want to see what you’ve done and what you’re up to. That’s how I’ve been using the blog this last while, keeping it for announcements and updates and not including a lot of content not directly related to my writing.
The most interesting blogs, however, have another component, whether it be provocative personal confessions or sheer enthusiasm for its niche. Those are the kind I most enjoy reading, and when I think to myself, “I would like to have a blog” it’s something more like that, something that someone might find exciting to page through.
For some reason, writing on the internet is much more intimidating to me than writing for print publications. I’m not sure why this is. Perhaps it’s because the potential response is so much more immediate and unfettered - someone can write a vicious comment or email within minutes of any posting, and things said about your writing can be dug up so easily, even years after the fact. Perhaps it’s just that I have been obsessed with the internet for far too much of my young life, and have assigned it some sort of mythic importance. Regardless of the reason, it would be a good thing to tame my anxieties surrounding having my words on the internet.
So, maddystuart.com is what it is, technical issues and sporadic posts and all. I don’t imagine there’s a lot of interest in what I thought about the COC Ring Cycle, although my reference to photoshopped pictures of muscled baritones still gets hits. We’ll see what this blog becomes.
supersexyfun
Rachel Kramer Bussel’s post Sex in the possibly public square resonated with me in a lot of ways.
For me, sex still exists at least partly in the shadows, in the bad old days of repression and shame. Stealing my brother’s copies of Maxim and my mother’s romance novels; feeling an erotic thrill when the 1920’s movie heroine is kidnapped; operatic tenors singing “come to the window” when they mean “come to my bed”; the brown-papered windows of the adult video store…
Despite all the liberation and feminist consciousness and purchases of vibrators in garish colors, when I think “sex” (not the concept, but the things that make my stomach tighten) I think of that closed-off, simmering world, where the door is cracked open just enough to glimpse one fishnet-clad limb. Which doesn’t mean I think about it any less, or with any less authenticity, or that I think that door needs to stay closed.
So sometimes I read the work of sex bloggers and think I could never possibly fit in. I’ve had a limited number of crazy adventures, I’ve got a limited selection of toys in the nightstand, and in the end I’m not convinced that toys or fetish outfits or even specific acts are especially interesting compared to all the just-beneath-the-surface tensions. Occasionally I wonder if the toys and the outfits are just a crutch, a shorthand for sexuality, a way to keep things interesting on the surface because something is deadening underneath. And then I wonder if that makes me sound like a conservative.