Getting Started October 4, 2006

Hello, Bloggers.
I’m thinking about all of your questions, and I feel like we have a lot of great material to cover.
Some of you may have begun setting up a blog, and others of you may need a little more assistance. My goal for our next class is that everyone who wants a blog shall have one!
The first posts you write are, in some ways, the easiest. You have, after all, a whole lifetime of stories just waiting to be told. Your first posts are the way you introduce yourself to your audience so…have fun!
We’ve talked about the fact that our blogs are public and that we need to be aware of how we present ourselves to an audience, but that issue has two sides. Consider this prompt from No One Cares What You Had for Lunch by Margaret Mason

Writing gives you time to consider how to present yourself. Online, you can be smarter, wittier, kinder. Alternately, you can be a mind-numbing bore. This sometimes happens because your audience (however small you think it may be) gives you stage fright. You worry that certain things could be misconstrued, so you’re tempted to water things down. You hone, delete, and reshape until you’ve sucked all the juice from your posts.

All readers need an occasional dose of schadenfreude, so fess up. How do you fail? Do you consistently kill plants? Keep getting fired? Always take the last cookie? That’s the stuff, friends. To err is human, but to share? Divine.