I've actually had something of a hard time writing these posts this week. Normally, I write easily and quickly, and have been doing so for 30 years, at least. What's so hard about a few extra blog posts for a great independent bookstore site?
I attribute this difficulty to a phenomenon that I might call "context adjustment costs" if I were an economist. Since I'm not, let's just chalk it up to "getting your bearings."
It turns out that writing for a blog is very much an in situ sort of thing: Where you are posting matters. It governs what assumptions you have about who is going to read your writing, and what they're interested in, and how much they know about you and your work and your subject matter. On our own blogs, most of us have some comfortable sense that the reader already knows us and has quite possibly been reading our posts all along. There's a shared history.
With a guest-blogging stint, everything is a little more mysterious, a little more up for grabs. You have to construct an image of your readers before you can begin to address them. It's like starting a new blog, which, as anyone who's ever done it knows, requires some care and calibration. I've been keeping my own personal blog for seven years now, so it's been a long time since I've had to perform this mental dance. It was good to be reminded again of the effort that every beginning blogger has to make.
In-between posts and talks about Say Everything, I had the pleasure yesterday of appearing on KQED's Forum show with Michael Krasny — that rare broadcast outlet that actually devotes an entire hour to topics, offering an opportunity to go deep into a subject. Such opportunities are increasingly rare in our culture; one reason I love blogs is that, like Forum, they provide it regularly.
Here's the audio of the show (which you can also find here at KQED's site):
And with that, I conclude my time here. Thanks to Powell's for the invite! If you look over at the right you'll see that the next guest up is Joe Pernice, whose music (under that name and Pernice Brothers) has always delighted me. (I'm especially partial to Discover a Lovelier You. But it's all really good!) So enjoy that — I know I will.