my wife asked me this the other day after looking at my site psg daily who are you writing it for? well, something along those lines of who in my mind were the posts being addressed to. and you know what, it was kind of hard to answer, because unless someone comments, unless someone posts a link to the entry, i do not know. i can look at my dashboard stats and i can see where they are coming from, but i also look at my dashboard and i see the amount of spam comments that my akismet has blocked and the amount of spam that doesn’t make it through the filter and i have to ask myself, how many of the unique hits that i get are really unique hits,and how many are electronic ghosts just crawling the site looking for an excuse to post a sex advert?
sometimes it doesn’t necessarily pay off to look to closely at that kind of thing. i suppose i expect that my writer friends and my musician friends and my artist friends might occasionally drop in after seeing something of interest in my twitterstream or my facebook wall, and i would hope that the odd random stranger would wash up on the shore, but really i can’t determine that until, as i said, someone actually responds.
would i stop writing if i thought that no one at all was looking here or there to actually ingest the words? i’m not sure – i don’t think so. some people might read this stuff and think it’s kind of ancillary to the other stuff i produce (the fiction and the poetry) but some of the ideas that i work out in these rambling blogs do inform those projects, and i think that some of the stuff i write here is creative in its own right. i mean, i have to sit here and type this stuff out and craft it into some kind of cohesive form so that even if no one reads it i am not embarrassed by my output. i cringe at typos made here as much as i do when i see them in a book. why wouldn’t i? if i didn’t have enough care for something to make sure that it was the best it could possibly be, why would i bother to waste any time and effort on it in the first place? wouldn’t make sense, would it? at least i hope it wouldn’t. shit, you could read my stuff and absolutely hate it but i hope even then you might be able to glimpse the effort and care that went into it.
i don’t want to say that i am writing it all for myself because that would be a little disingenuous. what kind of moron sits there mentally masturbating day after day, turning out thousands of words just to keep themselves amused? i may be a bit of a scribomaniac but that is because i really enjoy the art and craft of writing. it is not the horrible painful emotionally draining activity that some people would have you believe it is, and if they do really find it that way then it is a flaw in themselves that they should either deal with or find something else to do that doesn’t rake them over the coals quite so much.
i do then in a way write partially to please myself — to round out and flesh out thoughts; this is somewhere to let the flotsam and jetsam wash up; kind of like a backroom where you keep works in progress. i am assembling the nuts and bolts into one place so i can draw on them when i want to make my frankensteinian creations waltz out into the world.
did i answer the question i was asked here? maybe. i hope to some degree i did.
