Added thoughts about my previous post
Geez, I shouldn't be rewarded this much for posting a middle-of-the-night, I'm-feeling-unloved message. But I'm really appreciating how helpful your responses are to my previous post, so thank you very much to everyone's been responding.
Certain issues are cropping up over and over in the responses to that post, so I thought I should deal with them all in one post before I get started in responding individually to folks.
I didn't mean to suggest that anyone should feel guilty about not commenting. Cross my heart and hope to die, that wasn't my intention at all. I mean, I'm good at responding to meta posts, middling at responding to story posts, and absolutely terrible at responding to daily life posts. And these days, because of my Internet addiction, I have a strict "no commenting at blogs" policy (though I keep breaking it like crazy). So I can absolutely understand anyone who's better at reading blogs than at responding to them.
I only posted my previous query because I have a big Friends list and a small response rate, which suggested to me that there might be something problematic about my blogging style that was putting off readers who normally do post comments at blogs.
You think I should ask more questions. Yup. You're right. I've been bad at that. I'll try to be better.
You think I should write shorter posts more frequently rather than long posts infrequently. So do I. Honestly. I mean, I'd scream if I encountered messages as long as the posts I write.
The thing is, though, I can't. I have to be offline most of the time - those of you who have been following my saga with Internet addiction know why - and in the winter, I have to be offline for long stretches, because my Muse demands my service.
Quite honestly, I do edit my Daily Life posts to take out the most boring stuff. You guys only see two-thirds of what I write when I'm offline. But the two-thirds seems worth posting, so I do so when my online schedule allows me, which is only about every two to four weeks. By then, I've accumulated a lot of individual daily life entries, which all get wrapped up in a digest post.
If I didn't post digest posts of what I wrote offline, I'd be having to post one short Daily Life entry every two to four weeks. And then you'd miss out on what's actually going on in my daily life (which might or might not matter to you).
Here's the thing, though . . .
You don't have to read the entire Daily Life entry. That's why I started adding LJ-cut subheads, and gosh, I should have told you before my reason for doing that, shouldn't I? I figured you could treat each sub-entry within a Daily Life entry as though it were an individual entry (which is what it would be, if I were online every day). That way you could do what I do when I come onto a blog and find that someone has posted twenty new entries since the last time I visited: you can just skim for the subject headings that look most interesting, and ignore the rest.
So really, you're welcome to ignore ninety percent of each long post you encounter here and read the ten percent that looks interesting. And if you decide you want to comment on the ten percent, that will be wonderful. I promise not to say anything snarky like, "But didn't you notice that I said two paragraphs before . . . ?"
Certain issues are cropping up over and over in the responses to that post, so I thought I should deal with them all in one post before I get started in responding individually to folks.
I didn't mean to suggest that anyone should feel guilty about not commenting. Cross my heart and hope to die, that wasn't my intention at all. I mean, I'm good at responding to meta posts, middling at responding to story posts, and absolutely terrible at responding to daily life posts. And these days, because of my Internet addiction, I have a strict "no commenting at blogs" policy (though I keep breaking it like crazy). So I can absolutely understand anyone who's better at reading blogs than at responding to them.
I only posted my previous query because I have a big Friends list and a small response rate, which suggested to me that there might be something problematic about my blogging style that was putting off readers who normally do post comments at blogs.
You think I should ask more questions. Yup. You're right. I've been bad at that. I'll try to be better.
You think I should write shorter posts more frequently rather than long posts infrequently. So do I. Honestly. I mean, I'd scream if I encountered messages as long as the posts I write.
The thing is, though, I can't. I have to be offline most of the time - those of you who have been following my saga with Internet addiction know why - and in the winter, I have to be offline for long stretches, because my Muse demands my service.
Quite honestly, I do edit my Daily Life posts to take out the most boring stuff. You guys only see two-thirds of what I write when I'm offline. But the two-thirds seems worth posting, so I do so when my online schedule allows me, which is only about every two to four weeks. By then, I've accumulated a lot of individual daily life entries, which all get wrapped up in a digest post.
If I didn't post digest posts of what I wrote offline, I'd be having to post one short Daily Life entry every two to four weeks. And then you'd miss out on what's actually going on in my daily life (which might or might not matter to you).
Here's the thing, though . . .
You don't have to read the entire Daily Life entry. That's why I started adding LJ-cut subheads, and gosh, I should have told you before my reason for doing that, shouldn't I? I figured you could treat each sub-entry within a Daily Life entry as though it were an individual entry (which is what it would be, if I were online every day). That way you could do what I do when I come onto a blog and find that someone has posted twenty new entries since the last time I visited: you can just skim for the subject headings that look most interesting, and ignore the rest.
So really, you're welcome to ignore ninety percent of each long post you encounter here and read the ten percent that looks interesting. And if you decide you want to comment on the ten percent, that will be wonderful. I promise not to say anything snarky like, "But didn't you notice that I said two paragraphs before . . . ?"
Comments