(or:  How to Lose Readers on OS and Gain Some Mental Space)

Let me save you privacy lovers some time:  the easiest way to purposefully lose OS readers?  Post poetry – serious ass, technique-heavy, hugely structured sonnet series with oblique titles will do the trick nicely – none of that rambling fluffy free verse stuff for you if you want to blog in anonymous free range peace.

That being said, some background:

I’ve mentioned before, my parents are artists – artists who have changed mediums from photography to found materials to formal oils to assemblages to documentaries to shorts – in short, both are visual artists.  Both are highly competitive- and I signed a non-compete very early on in life.  So I write, always have.  And I got small press published too easily (first submission) and way too young (fourteen).  And since then I have been lucky enough to have my writing feature in most of my paid work.  (web content editor, non-profit and lost cause developmentJ)

But I hadn’t written for myself in years – every thing was business related, researched if for business press or calculated to make the reader cry and cough up cash if I was fundraising.  I needed to get back to writing what I wanted to write, without a deadline, without a fundraising goal, without a need to research European business real estate IT retrofits in historic buildings.  I’d been hiring out my words for so long; I didn’t know what I even had to say anymore.

I started off with a small knitting blog on a huge site that turned into more of a darkly humorous recounting of a kind of serious health issue in 2008.  And I got some decent hits, but little to no comments.  However, I had been a Salon junkie for years, but for some reason I thought table talk and OS were the same thing, until I clicked on an OS link and fell in love with the format and the possibilities.  So I switched my blog right before Christmas this year.  One comment on the first.  Some very kind comments on a wallowing pity me of the Christmas Birthday second post.  My marketing background kicked in and a provocatively titled 25 list did ok – and be still my heart, TBucket, one of my favourite writers on here – sent me an email complimenting my writing.  Dear god, actual unblog-whored praise from a writer I loved reading.

See, something you should know is how isolating it is to work as a marketing consultant or a development person in a non-profit – if you’re consulting they usually have no one on board to do their marketing and non-profits are so mission obsessed that no one cares how or why every reader starts crying at the same spot in the annual appeal – they just want them to be moved enough to write a check.  No one understands why you walk around the block five times to get that sentence to align perfectly in your head – and no one understands your elation when you get it down on paper.  (this verges on wallowing so I apologise – poor misunderstood artist me! ;).

Then I wrote the neighbor’s sex life post – completely tossed off in 15 minutes at work – the original version had three different beginning plot points that I meant to develop but didn’t have the time (edited out the next day after it made the front page).  And yes, I had pictures, but those were taken for my office mates I’d been telling the story to for a week who were insisting the car couldn’t have the paint job I was describing.  An hour later it hit EP and the damn front page.  Most of the compliments were great, several were the deadly ‘this is awful’ variety, a few emails were a little disturbing.  But ok, one in a million, nice boost for a beginning blogger, not going to happen again any time soon.  Next time I wouldn’t use the word ‘sex’ in a title.

Two days later my ten year old called me with sex fantasies about Charlie and the Chocolate factory.  The post was basically me sitting down and streamlining a conversation I had with another director in my office about the phone call.  It was funny, quick and at least didn’t have several beginning plot points that I’d abandoned. Lalalalala, this is how I post when I don’t think anyone’s reading.  The fricking thing was EP’d and on the front page quick enough to make my head spin.  Again, the wonderful supportive funny comments, again a few wonky emails, but in the main, very positive.

I decided to concentrate on other people’s posts, commenting and enjoying the wonderful work.  Then I made the deadly mistake (completely my own insanity speaking here, people) of posting a joke response to a wonderful post of Sandra’s where I – oh, the self-imposed drama of it all – posted a ten year old pic of myself – way more self-exposure than my comfort zone allowed.  But damn, who reads my blog, really?  Apparently more than my little mind can handle.  Again, it’s me, not you, lovely OS readers.  I wasn’t an inner circle beta, but I seemed to be making serious inroads on the complete outer fringe of the inner sanctuary and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be there.  I felt there were so many more writers on here that should have been getting the attention and the EPs and the front page that I felt the worst kind of surface fraud – a marketer using clever tricks for attention when lovely, serious, wonderful writers were sending up plaintive is anybody out there posts that echoed hollowly in the confines of their own blog space where very few visited.  Meantime, I was getting locked into a humour writer, which is part of what I do, but I felt that designation blocked me from writing about some more serious topics I had in mind.

As a self-described marketing genius, I deliberately posted the stultifying sonnet series. 

Much better, that. 

I went away for a while, in part due to a tremendous work load, in part to figure out what was bothering me about the situation – people were reading my work and responding positively and it was making me feel – I don’t know – exposed, overly vulnerable, very surfacey and glib – I wasn’t really sure this is what I wanted to be writing.

But then a butt-biting easter turtle sang the OS siren song so sweetly that I couldn’t resist.  And so here I am again.  Nerves reined in somewhat, determined to write what I want to write – and making a promise not to drive you away again with sonnets – you know, unless there’s an open call or something.