Laurabelle’s Blog

Until this afternoon, if you asked me why I kept a blog (two blogs, in fact), I would have told you that it was so people would read it. I've just realized that I was wrong.

Yesterday the UW student writers' group Dragon's Pen hosted a lecture by Syne Mitchell, and I went, and it was very informative and enjoyable. She said many interesting things, one of which is that if you get published, that means that people will read your work. Your family and friends will read it. Random people on the bus will read it. I chuckled a bit at that, because, well, duh. Isn't that the point of publishing?

But just a couple of weeks ago I cringed at being linked to by a blogger with a bigger readership than I. Why did I react that way? It's not that I don't want anyone to read my blog; I just didn't expect them to. Although theoretically the point of publishing my blog is to make it available to anyone, I know that realistically, only people who know me are going to read it more than once or occasionally. I started a blog nearly three years ago as a partial substitute for letters to friends and family at home, and I still have that sort of epistolary feeling, of writing to people I know. Of course there's the possibility of people, mostly active bloggers, finding me through blogger-friends (as I found Dorothea and Shelley), but there's still a person-to-person connection there. Not random surfers.

In my mind, there is a very gray line between diary and letter. I used to write huge epistles to Emily, pages every day, and mail them on the same day each week. I knew exactly how many pages I could write before having to pay extra postage. I could never keep a diary for those years, because I had nothing left to write to myself. I told it all to Emily.

Now I am keeping a paper journal again, and I write in it things that I can't write here. It is a letter to my future self. This blog as well is an letter, written to my friends but open to the world.

It seems that no matter what happens in my life, Shelley has something to say about it in her blog. Yesterday she addressed the topic of writing styles in personal weblogs, specifically the art of writing obliquely, touching but not stressing the real subject. I find myself wanting to write about Emily, about our friendship, about how much she means to me, without using those words. I want my readers to meet her, to discover her through my writing, as I met her every week in the mail.

Siehe, es weinen die Götter, es weinen die Göttinen alle,
daß das Schöne vergeht, daß das Volkommene stirbt.
Auch ein Klaglied zu sein im Mund der Geliebten ist herrlich,
denn das Gemeine geht klanglos zum Orkus hinab.
— Schiller, Nänie