Breaking into Blogging: the class–a true first draft by moi–with an addition

Everybody blogs for different reasons. I love to write, and to make myself crazed then laugh. Until recently I did a lot of political blogging and that can be ugly. I want blogging to be fun. Call me selfish but I think blogging should be an enjoyable experience. I would rather do political work in person not virtually. I am also obsessive about my writing, and that can be fun at times, but I was in dire need of a vacation. A real one that includes just hanging at the beach.

Am finally in a great mood–only took five days to relax. Kind of a record since I have been blogging for no dollars.
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Always thought that when the first blogging classes were offered, it will be all over, as anything is when it’s mass.

I like being a cult. Wanted to be Parker Posey, not Julia Roberts, but I do love Jennifer Anniston. Don’t really know what that means, but….
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When I answered Shayna‘s questions, I loved the no negativity of the our musical highway project. There is way too much negativity both in the world and in the blogosphere. See the right sidebar.

It was just a matter of time. Breaking into blogging is one class I’m probably better qualified to teach than most people. Of course I will probably be the example of how not to blog though it truly has brought me much joy along with the angst.

“How not to be a slave to your blog?” Unless you’re well known or come to blogging with connections, tech, product placement, are a Christian blogger, Republican, member of the rad right, Stop the ACLU helps, though I am a member of The ACLU, or have the kind of blog built on fluff or that can have guest bloggers, you have to be a slave to your blog to have a Technorati under 3,000 out of 50 million tracked blogs. Okay just under 3,000 but for a liberal woman over the age of 40, that is frigging incredible. And yes I am damn proud.

It must be nice to begin a blog knowing what a blogroll is; knowing what linking means; knowing other bloggers and tricks. I followed StephK into BE; I didn’t ask her for help. Our writing class had been catfight hell, one that we’re never supposed to talk about. More confidential than what goes on in a therapists office, not the conversation between therapist and patient but the ancillary process. I could write about the place that I worked in; I could disguise patients names, details and other things and then feel free to write.

But write about writing class? I was accused of doing something that I had never done. So me. Nothing to do with StephK. Wrote about it in the abstract. The person who accidentally told the lies read it, and offered to set it straight. But really how can you make something right when the damage was done two years ago? Accidentally told the lies? Long story. I think it was big of her to admit it, and very very brave. Yet if I dared write about writing class I would be blackballed from life and from ever being published again.

Oh right, I haven’t been published in the past two years.

All my time has been spent blogging. Or writing. My vacations have been spent doing both–changes of scenery blogging, my friends call them.* Or reading other peoples blogs.

I don’t know if they teach that reading blogs is a necessary and usually fun part of the process because you get to meet people like Dan, MizB, Cooper, the Wombat,JoeM, Cat, Sar, Shayna, Bone, Sage, Chandira, Marinade Dave, Jacob, Jason, Gina, Dawn, the entire Pez family, Jason, our lawd and master the great duke dawg dog Doug, Mrs. M, Trine, Ally, and many many other people. Please don’t be insulted if I left you out. It’s early and I’m on my first of many coffees

Sometimes, like now, it is overwhelming. Yet nobody can call themselves a blogger unless they participate in a blogging circuit or ten.

While I have been called a puta, nobody has ever called me a comment whore. I will answer all comments. Just need some time.

I have been called just about everything else in the past two years. Do they teach in blogging class how to defend your morals and your politics? Even when you’re not writing anything immoral or political? Most people leave me alone now. I am too well known, and I do delete. But I spent many nights crying or keeping myself from crying by writing.

And no, you people who think that a writer must get used to criticism, writers don’t have to defend telling a story that some people have moral issues with, but you must be able to defend the substance of the writing. By that I mean is the story believable? Are the characters believable? Is it interesting? Would people want to read it….

And in my case, always the organization. “Great characters.” “Great story, is disorganized.” Yet nary a tip on how to organize myself. Bloggers have shown and taught me that

Even I know that I’m an excellent writer. I choose my words carefully, though I have problems with “chose” and “choose.” I can tell a story quickly and succinctly. I have organizational problems but have learned through blogging how to work around them. I am sorry that I ever brought my problems up. It makes me less big-bucks sellable and I know that. People are interested, only I hold myself back with a question like the following:

Why take a chance on me when you can get somebody without problems who is younger and cuter? Only working through problems and learning from them is worthy. Few people know what I look like, and well I was cute at seven, though looked twelve, and look damn good for anybody over 40. Need to lose some weight, but don’t need any work done or so say my friends who are experts on such matters.

I have a great story. Young pretty girl who has the world at her feet but doesn’t realize that meets an almost famous singer/songwriter, Zachary, at her ex-husband’s club for she was divorced at 26. Zachary is charming, funny and comes with a great reference from that woman singer/songwriter with the gravelly voice and famous poet daddy. Zachary becomes depressed and abusive. In the early 1980’s girls who live in zip code 10021, the richest in the USA, are never abused, or so the police say.
She knows nothing about abuse, but knows that somebody who is capable of breaking her things is capable of breaking her.

Her mother is her age now, her father is a bit older. He is a CPA who has always been successful, but can you say famous Russian dancer who defected and was considered the sexiest of the sexy, the biggest of the big? He had become her father’s client and friend. Her father became very in demand. Yes second and third acts are possible in America. He was uber successful but a husband and daddy first.

He had been successful enough to stop her from meeting a Rolling Stone or three and a Beatle when she was in high school and they were in London. Much of his life seemed to be centered around stopping her from meeting The Stones until it became her private joke for she had no interest in meeting them. Well some, but….

She used to call her parents the original YUPPIES for they redefined aging to her. They were as well traveled, as overly-caring and involved in their children’s lives as any baby boomer’s are now. She finds this whole baby boomers as the first generation of too caring parents, and into health and never retiring, boring and not true, for her parents were just like that. Her father had a stroke at his desk and died five days later, at 77.

He lived an amazing life and one she is proud to recount. Her mother, well her mother is her true hero for so many reason, not the least being that she figured out Zachary was “obsessed,” at a time when it just wasn’t mentioned. Because she had the love and support of her parents, though her relationship with her father was complicated, and because something in her screams “survivor,” not the reality show, the real thing, she survived Zachary and thrived.

Oh yes, she was adopted, and had pneumonia at thirteen months. The later probably caused her problems but the child psychologists into adulthood called it being “resistant to being adopted.” Later other therapists would apologize for the hell she
had been put in. Having a weird gait is a problem of being adopted? The anti-adoption people would like you to think that learning disorders, ADHD, and most other problems are caused by the mere act of being adopted. They would say that she is in denial, that she couldn’t possibly have bonded with her adoptive family–heard a whole lecture on that. They would like you to believe that adoptive parents are slave owners. Do you know how sickening that is when you have real problems and it’s the 60’s, and 70’s and therapists bought into that shit? Not the slave owner part, but the rest.

When Dominique Dunne was killed a short time after Zachary stopped stalking the author, her father Dominick, did much to help people understand how abuse happens even to the privileged. He also prove that second or third acts are possible in America. Mr. Dunne, my Mom and I love you. Your books gave her much happiness when she became blind. Unfortunately Vanity Fair wasn’t a magazine for the blind, so I would have to read her anything you wrote and many other stories. I am so happy that I did that for her death shook me more than I could have believed. It wasn’t peaceful as my Dad’s was, and…

I am honest to the core. That isn’t a good thing in world where the more games you play the better you do. I don’t play games.
I have devoted way too much of my life to blogging. But to have a Technorati under 3,000 of 50 million tracked, you kind of have to unless you’re famous, or have or are the other things that I mentioned.

I had to learn basic HTML despite my famous ineptness. I had my blog designed when I saw that it was going to be successful. You have to do everything possible to stand out from the crowd, short of….I’m not sure what,

I had to learn about RSS feeds and other technical aspects. The course might not teach these things but they are really the most important aspects for a writer. Because if you can write and capture peoples interest, you don’t need a course on how to blog, or what to blog about. That should come naturally.

Blogging has become too big a game for me. People send me their resumes, emails with their problems, and expect me to drop everything to help them. Have to help myself first, thank you.

It’s been a 24/7 job for almost two years now, and my RLF’s are sick of it; my blogging friends just want me to relax.

While I was becoming known, I was becoming known as a passionate cause centered person, and I became distracted from my goal because of this country’s reactionary politics. Some people think I’m selfish for giving up politics or for refusing to give up my blog for the greater good.

Excuse me, but I have a blog, and it’s name is Courting…and together we have traveled many a road over the past two years. I woke up this morning, and jumped out of bed, because while I don’t usually trash individuals, I wrote a rather infamous letter several years ago, under another name, to Mediabistro about a book.

The then Mediabistro editor, now NYmgazine.com editor, missed a key phrase “as if,” and called me anti-Semitic. Actually he devoted a column to it. As I’m Jewish and understand the need for Israel though not its recent actions, this hurt to the core. When he was fired from the job in between the two I mentioned, I did trash him. I feel incredibly guilty. Of course the only person I will hurt will be me. I am so good at that.

Since he did that to me, I would take comments that insulted my morals and/or politics, blockquote them, and write a post about it. People loved them. I am not proud of my behavior. If people don’t like liberal NY Jewish women who have done drugs and slept around, and lived to talk about it, that’s their problem. Courting isn’t a snarky blog. I was an active participant in the later part of the 60’s, 70’s and first half of the 80’s—when I believe the 60’s really ended. I have an excellent memory and am articulate. I will continue writing stories that amuse me and that people might enjoy. I won’t be insulting or nasty. I can be. He who…once told me that I out-mastered the master at sarcasm. Neither of us are now.

I honestly began Courting for writing practice and to look at unedited work in print because that is helpful. Then I thought, I hate writing queries; I hate selling myself, let Courting do it for me. Now I go into the third person to detach myself a bit

We have people interested in us. We want the stars, the moon, and the sun, oh how we love the sun which is out today. As most of you know I am a Moonchild, and believe that the moon guides the ocean which guides women. Any woman who has ever had her period understands that. Courting isn’t a period, menopause, or weight loss blog. We suppose they’re needed, but…and we will only say that we have just reached menopause and love everything about it. One day we will re-post the story of Lucia’s accidental hysterectomy.

We love having many male readers so we try not to be too girly despite the pink, or cute, or girl gross. It’s a fine line we straddle, but we do it with grace and precision. We are proud to be Courting Destiny.

“You can’t always get what you want, but you can always get what you need.” We need much. Remember, we’re the person who just spent more than the average persons yearly salary on our teeth, the one part of our body that there has been work done on.

This isn’t the fun part of the trip. This is the I stayed in the wrong hotel, more on that when I get home, and everybody is really nice including the people that I know but I feel like a stranger in a strange land who will feel at home tomorrow, after I get on the train heading north to the city that I do love where there are people that I truly care about, including our lord and master, just call him that because I know it embarrasses him.

In blogging I have found a new and real family. Most of us have never met each other, but we can become more honest, more raw with each other than we can become with many people in our real lives. In blogging we learn how to be truthful, and how not to feel shame for being merely mortal.

Comments are nice but so not the point. I edit posts after putting them up, many times. What you see in the morning, might not be at all the same that night. I put some back into draft.

I will be out all day so won’t have the opportunity to do that. This is an unvarnished, real first draft. *And now begins the real vacation. The one that isn’t a change of blogging scenery, but is about seeing friends, and writing. An old friend from NY, who wasn’t supposed to be in town but came home early to see me, is in my hotel room. We were just laughing over the time I said about my black couch: “I want to get all the black out of my life.” Then I looked at him. “uh, Eugene, I don’t mean…”

Okay, I added somethings, but didn’t edit. That’s hard, but real life calls. We have to finish our who is the better baby boomer contest. I’m winning because I sort of remember when Cambria Heights in Queens was White. I remember being at my parents friends house on a boulevard with the center isle filled with trees, and drinking out of red tin glasses that made everything taste metallic. Probably how heavy metal was invented.