I’m back after taking a month off from blogging! I decided to take that time away because I was feeling really frustrated about blogging and the constant need to feed the beast. It wasn’t feeling fun anymore, and I needed to take stock of what I wanted to get out of my web presence.
I’ve had a website for a long time now. I don’t remember when I bought my domain name, but it’s been quite a while. At first it was just a place to park my resume while I was looking for freelance writing jobs, but a couple of years ago I decided to blog regularly in preparation for the publication of Ash. Everybody says that an author has to have a website, and I agree. I’d been writing for AfterEllen.com for a while by then, and that experience completely sold me on the significance of the internet.
But writing for my own personal website is so different from writing for AfterEllen. For one thing, it’s, um, personal. That means that the public response to my blog posts, usually in the form of comments, also feels more personal. When people disagreed with me at AfterEllen, I could brush it off as part of the job. When people disagree with me on my own website, it upsets me.
Pile on a ton of blog reviews and comments about Ash, and I started to get really twitchy about saying anything that could possibly result in a negative reaction.
It’s a good thing I took a month off, because it gave me some valuable perspective. I think it’s probably a good idea for me to take a month off every year, actually, just to check in on what’s working and not working.
Anyway, during that time off, I realized that I actually missed blogging! I read through many of my old posts, and it became very clear that I had a lot more fun with blogging before Ash was released. This is sad. I want to regain that sense of fun and optimism about expressing my opinion on my little corner of the internet. Otherwise, blogging feels like a chore, and I have enough chores in my life.
So, I thought a lot about what I wanted and what I didn’t want, and here are my findings:
1. I am going to blog when I want, and I’m not going to blog if I don’t want to.
Before, I had this idea that I needed to blog X times per week in order to make sure traffic continues to my site, but actually, why? I’m not trying to make any money from ad revenue; page views don’t matter. And also, I realized (after talking with Sarah Warn) that the web has changed. Now we have Twitter and Facebook and all these other social networking sites that allow you to broadcast your new posts, and that brings people to you. You don’t have to blog every day anymore to make sure people come. So I won’t.
If you want to know when I update, I encourage you to subscribe to my RSS feed, follow me on Twitter, or add me as a friend on Facebook. Or just stop by every once in a while. I’ll still be here!
2. I’m going to be much more choosy about when to allow comments.
I’ve realized that a lot of my anxiety about blogging is due to comments. For example, whenever I blog about gender or sexuality (subjects that I am totally fascinated by!), I always get visitors from afar who come here to do a bit of mansplaining. I’m sick of it.
If you comment in a way that is overly negative or dismissive or too mansplainy, period, I will delete your comment.
And sometimes, I will not allow comments. I’ve realized that not every blog post is meant to be a debate or a discussion. There are forums for that.
3. However, I really enjoy getting email and feedback from readers, and if I close comments, I may instead invite you to email me directly. I’ve also decided to simply list my email address on my contact page rather than use a form, in order to encourage direct communication. (Also, I suspect that form was malfunctioning at times).
4. One of the best things about the way the web works now is its social connectedness. To that end, I’ve appended a few social networking buttons to each post, so you can easily tweet it or email it to someone else. I hope you’ll use them!
So, these are my blog policies for 2010. I’m not opening comments for this post, but if you have feedback about it, I do encourage you to email me at mlo [at] malindalo [dot] com. Thanks for visiting!
P.S. Also, during my time off I realized I wanted a new blog design. So if you’re reading this on a reader, please come by www.malindalo.com and check out my new digs. My goal was to be clean and uncluttered. I’d love to figure out how to get my banner image to stay put when people resize their screens, but I’m starting to think it may be a pipe dream (at least unless I hire a designer, which I’m not going to, because I kinda like tinkering with it myself).
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