The Nekkid Bloggers

Work is light at the moment. Too light. You can always tell when our day-job business isn’t doing so well because I start waffling away like there’s no tomorrow. Rich finds blogging stressful but I find that it is a distraction from the pressures of real life. On rare occasions when I write what I feel is a real cracker of a post, it can even give me an adrenaline rush that’s nearly as good as sex (yeah, I'm weird that way.) Rich says I’m addicted (to blogging, not sex, although the poor chap is ever hopeful.)

Sometimes it hits me just how much of our lives we’re all giving up to post this stuff. In short, blogging is bloody hard work. In the same way a photographer will seek to realise his creative vision from a seed of an idea in his head, the same birthing process applies to writing a blog post. In both cases you have to create something from nothing. The seed is ugly, crude and inelegant at first, but then it grows and after the umpteenth re-write it suddenly crystallises into something coherent, and at that point I know it’s ready.

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"Seed" (Yeah, I know, I'm kinda like a giant pink blob, but I like it)

The average life-span for a blog is currently 8 months. Boggling I know, but over 95% of blogs are over by the time this milestone is reached. Thankfully I mainly follow the remaining 5 percent. The blogs that Rich and I enjoy, usually have similar longevity and posting patterns and we now know many of the blog authors so well that they have become friends.

If you’ve been regularly blogging several times a week for more than a year then you’ll know enough about the cycles of blogging to recognise when a fellow blogger is experiencing a bit of a downer. It’s inevitable that bloggers sometimes experience some degree of existential angst, particularly with art blogs because artists typically pour all of their emotions into their art forms, and IMO blogging can be just as much a creative artistic process as painting or photography. Such moments of self-doubt are actually a form of “blog depression” and most blog authors experience it at some point. Sometimes I too get so lost up my own ass that I just can’t write any more and I want to delete the whole bloody thing. Of course the bloggie pressure is just imagined…I’m taking it all too seriously and losing my sense of proportion. (Rich usually gives me a good kick up my big blobby pink butt when that happens.)

Absolutely everyone questions their blogging at some point. Am I becoming boring? Do I have to constantly produce new and different content to keep people interested? Should I have a blog makeover? Am I posting the same as everyone else? Why aren’t more people commenting? Was it something I wrote? Am I fat? Do I smell? Is anybody reading this crap? Shall I give up?

When you reach that point, congratulations, you have finally reached the zen-like state of Bloggie-Self-Enlightenment. It’s important to question oneself, otherwise how will your blogging grow?

The harsh reality is that yes, you might be lucky enough to have hundreds (even thousands) of regular readers. However don’t kid yourself. You are nothing more to most of them than a tiny little free T.V. entertainment channel. Because you run a rude, nude blog, very few of them are ever going to admit to reading your pornographic filth (which it isn’t of course, but I bet most of their wives wouldn’t share that assessment.) Thus although your hits might be off the scale and your readers might love your writing and images, only an extremely small percentage of them will actually leave comments. This means that nude bloggers actually have a much tougher time than other regular bloggers, and you will need to be more determined and self-assured than ever in order to keep going in the face of the deafening silence of the blogosphere. Just remember that ultimately it doesn’t really matter if anyone is reading your blog or not. You need to do it for yourself, otherwise you’ll just go stark raving crazy and your blog will eventually consume you (in fact there’s a strong probability that this will happen anyway.)

As for how long your blog will last, some blogs die young, some age gracefully. Which will you choose? My own recommendation is to stay in it for the long haul. Once you get past the initial couple of years, you really start building something, and by that I mean not only a philosophy and style particular to your own blog, but more importantly you start to make friends and create a real community. And when that happens, your life will be rich indeed.

As for myself, when I get a bit disillusioned with the whole caboodle, I take a step back and refer to the very helpful Manual On Blog Depression. If you’re a long term blogger, go ahead and download the pdf here. Consider it the equivalent of Aunty Lin giving you a blob of homework. And if you don’t recognise yourself somewhere in there over the last few years, then I’ll buy you a beer.