My Blogging Style- Personal Versus Professional

In the previous post I constructed a relatively dry post about what it takes to produce a professional blog. This post is going to be far more enjoyable for me because I am going to spend a little time talking about how I write for this blog.

I began my interaction with the online world in my early twenties. Chat rooms on AOL and Compuserve were sort of the training grounds in which I began to learn what lay in cyberspace. I graduated from those into debating and discussing politics and life on some message boards.

For a while CNN was one of my regular haunts. Those message boards taught me a lot about many things. It exposed me to some of the finer experiences online and it educated me about how nasty things could get when people weren't looking you in the eye.

I also learned that the moderators of the boards had tremendous influence on the discussion. To a certain extent you could blame some very negative experiences with one mod as being the reason I started blogging. I am sure that if you asked the Shmata Queen she'd tell you how irritated we were with a woman who thought that it was her job to edit our comments.

Eventually I decided that I was tired of the shackles that I was bound in and I started this blog. Unfettered I started my blogging career with a little hesitation but a lot of energy. Over time I developed a style and a rhythm that has stuck with me.

Here at the Shack I just write about whatever and whenever. I don't spend any time worrying about my writing. I rarely edit the posts and don't concern myself with whether the posts are going to offend or upset others. And while I am quite aware of my stats I really don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out ways to gain new traffic.

Look, I am like a million other bloggers. I'd love to say that each month ten million unique users come here to see what I have to say. I'd love to see a 100 comments on each post. It would be nice. It would be great to see that happen and it would be even better to have someone pay me enough to do this on a full time basis.

But I write because I really do love it. I write because when I feel pain in my heart this is one of the ways in which I exorcise those demons. I write because it helps me to clarify and better understand myself.

I write because I write. I write because without this place all of my fair would fall out, my teeth would be ground down to little nubs and I'd have a massive coronary from stress.

It is a coping skill my writing.