Something funny happened on the way to the publisher...

I became a blogger.

So I’m pausing to pat myself on the back—a bit—for crossing the year-one blogging divide. Not a small feat, or so I’m told. According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned.

I started this site last August 19, with a post about my daughter, without whose help I never would have made it off the ground.

I was not what you would call an enthusiastic blogger. Publishers and agents, who said they liked my second book, a few even loved it—yet they would not take it on. Since I no longer had my newspaper column , I was left without a “platform” they moaned, a demonstrable readership. (Even being called “early Nora Ephron didn’t help!)

Enter blogging. By casting my writing out onto the web, they opined, I would attract a following, create such a platform and thereby become publishable. That’s the theory, anyway. Reality, as always, tends to get in the way.

Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, has reported that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but “it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views...There’s a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one.”

Okay, so my audience exceeds that, but not by nearly as much as I had hoped. Like many folks of my generation, I find myself so overwhelmed by the marketing of this thing that it freezes me into inaction.

So until/unless I figure it out, I have come to terms with what is. I am determined to continue—even if I am an audience of one. It is, at a minimum, a date with myself, a date to show up on the page at least once a week, to continue and not get tossed away. This is no small thing in my life. I meet this commitment—others, not so much.

I’ve had three months of free time to work on my second “novel” and have done next to bupkis, nada. Whatever creative juices have been given over to me dried up. I am the Sahara of the literary world. Continuing here, on this site, is helping me make peace with that and move on.

Next week I will be back in my “real life”, back in Sarasota, back at work in B&N. This blog will continue and at some future time I hope to find my way back to that book or on to new ones.

Hope you stay tuned...and it wouldn't hurt if you would pass the word along to others. Thanks.
span>