I told Inskidee that I was going to do it, and there I did it. You were probably thought this was going to be an instructional lesson about sloths and their reproduction. Or you might have thought that I was going to make a clever reference to some sort of anime.
Well, I’m not doing either.
I’m writing about blogging.
I’m nowhere near the master of this type of post. When Irina, Karandi or anyone else shares their opinions about blogging, it feels like a narrative born out of some earned inner reflection. The posts come with a sense of grace and style that makes me pause for a moment and nod. As the great bard said, “They just laid some wisdom on my ass.”
My thoughts have been neither eloquent nor have they been enlightening. No. Every time I’ve thought about writing this post, every sentence in my head just felt like I was begging, “Please. Please love me.”
Part of this is because I’m a neurotic mess, and part of it is because I feel like I haven’t earned the right for introspection. I’ve been doing this months. They’ve been at it for years.
I’m getting ahead of myself though. A few years ago, someone described me as having a fun think-as-you-write prose with some shaky ideas. It’s not something I took as an insult. I do have some shaky ideas, and sometimes I have some good ideas and have trouble explaining them.
Either way, I like to think of my writing as pretentious nonsense. I don’t have any real credentials to write the stuff I do. I don’t have the breadth of knowledge that others do. I’m pretty much just writing what I see and hoping that it’s interesting enough for people to read it.
Sometimes it is. I mean I’ve made four legit roundups, and that is awesome.
The thing is I have zero sense if it’s any good.
Way back when I would gauge how good a post was by the number of comments. If I scored two or three, I was good. If I got five or six, well that was golden.
Now I’m long past the heyday that I found myself in back in 2008 when I got hundreds of visits. Now I’m happy if I crack 40.
Here’s the thing, I’m not complaining. I’m grateful that anyone wants to read what I’ve written.
I just don’t know how to get people to comment. I don’t know if I’m just not writing anything interesting enough, or if I’m writing too long. Am I not picking good enough subjects?
All of that said, there is another side of me that wonders if I would do anything else. I might write pretentious nonsense, but I like writing pretentious nonsense. I restarted this blog because I wanted to write long pieces about shows that I wanted to revisit. They’re not brilliant, but they are fun to think about.
So here I am. I just crossed 210 posts — a minuscule number, really — with the ultimate conundrum. Am I doing something wrong? Should I try to fix it? Would I even know how?
The answer is, “I don’t know.”
And that is what sloths look like when they’re mating.
Anyways, thanks for reading.
In Search of Number Nine — An anime blog 
Comments. Honestly, a lot of stuff that I read I just won’t comment upon immediately, needing some time to think it through and–if I intend to respond–do the research so that I can back my opinions. (One instance wherein I already had the research handy was you “Loli” post, and then that went away. . .) Besides, not all comments are conducive to discussion. Please feel free to read some of the commentary left on my post reviewing ep 3 of Fire Force–comments left despite the disclaimers I wrote into the post itself. . .
So I work in a field where I see internet comments all day, so I definitely agree that not all comments are equal. I’m equally guilty of not leaving comments as well.
Thanks for sharing your secret to life! I’m glad we could read it. I find myself savoring the amount of comments I get more than anything else (oddly enough). It shows that someone out there actually read whatever I had out instead of possibly skimming through it. Despite the amount of views / likes that post probably gets, i’m always looking at the comments unintentionally despite the possible reprucussions…
Yeah. I’m not that much different. It’s funny. I’ve had this post brewing in the back of my head for weeks, and when I read the phrase How sloths reproduce, it was like a seed crystal and the rest of the post formed around it.
I get where you’re coming from. Sometimes it seems completely random which posts will get a comments and which will get nothing but radio silence. I’ve tried including questions for readers at the end of my reviews to try and help spark conversation, but generally it doesn’t seem to help much.
Then again, as a reader I don’t always comment of posts, even if I found them really interesting, because sometimes I just can’t think of anything intelligent to add to the conversation 😉
You do have a point. I don’t always comment either, especially if the post is referencing a show I haven’t seen or a manga I haven’t read. I just don’t have anything to say then.
I wonder whether folks are continuing to stick to the more ‘instant’ social media outlets?
I remember when I started my other blog ten years ago and wow, community seemed much bigger and far more engaged around blogs – or at least, for me it was because my ‘engagement’ then was far different to now. (Though I’m not doing many discussion posts at all tbh).
Blogs (and forums even more so) seem to have far smaller audiences these days I reckon. My current blog is only 6 months old and it’s much smaller than my first blog was at the same time… though while poetry is niche compared to fiction, I guess anime is niche too, though always growing and probably more popular than poetry now 😀
“Either way, I like to think of my writing as pretentious nonsense. I don’t have any real credentials to write the stuff I do.”
I’m not sure what the criteria is to declare something either “pretentious” or “nonsense.” Since I don’t know the answer to that, I try to start with something I do know.
The desire and drive to write are themselves your credentials.
Everything else is just research.
“The thing is I have zero sense if it’s any good.”
Folks are probably sick of hearing me say this, but I’ve never liked anything I’ve ever written. And that’s putting a positive spin on it! But I think that sometimes, the real meaning gets lost. It’s not that I think my writing is, in and of itself, terrible. It’s that it falls short of saying what I wanted to say.
I want to be a better writer. Sounds like you do, too. I think that’s not only healthy, I think it’s a prerequisite to becoming a great writer. Because let’s face it: who wants to be a mediocre writer?
Let’s put this feeling into perspective.
St. Thomas Aquinas was among the most intelligent humans whose work I’ve read, at least in the philosophical/theological topics. He’s universally recognized as a leader in thought from the 1200s. To this day, he influences schools of thought. And yet, he called his own writing straw, as if he were ready to have it burned:
https://www.catholic.com/qa/when-st-thomas-aquinas-likened-his-work-to-straw-was-that-a-retraction-of-what-he-wrote
If such a luminary looks upon his works that way, I kinda think we’re in good company.
There’s a reason I’ve highlighted your posts at least twice on my site. Keep following your muse. Keep trying express yourself.
Pretentious nonsense rocks.