Dovegreyreader encouraged me to start a blog earlier this year. Elaine, you must, it’s great fun, so OK, decided to give it a go. Typepad give you one month’s free trial so you can muck about with colours, designs, typelists and generally just twiddle about a bit until you have a vague idea of what you are doing. The knowledge base is very useful for questions about where you are going wrong, but Widgets continue to defeat me, and I have decided that my blog will be widget free, for the moment anyway.
So what have I found since I posted my first entry? Lots of surprises, I can tell you. After I had posted a couple of times I clicked onto my Stats and was totally dumbfounded to find that I had had 13 hits. Yes, thirteen! I was ecstatic. Who on earth would want to look at my blog or track it down? Comments were left mainly by fellow bloggers/friends who were very good at giving me a boost and making me feel wanted and so I carried on and recklessly set up a standing order to Typepad of the outrageous sum of some $8 a month to allow me the use of their blogging facility.
I am now celebrating six months of blogging, and have to say that I simply love it. So many interesting people have dropped in and left witty, funny, encouraging comments. In turn I have clicked onto their links and have found many lively, beautiful and interesting blogs which I now regularly visit. There is a list of these sites and blogs that I like to check out in the right hand column of my site, but there are many more I also dip into.
I have taken part in the RIP Challenge and am now half way through another 
such Challenge, From the Bookstacks, all set by book bloggers and all encouraging you to read/re-read/ discover new and old books. I note there is a Classic Challenge coming up in the New Year and I daresay I shall be drawn into that as well. Starting a blog is like dropping a pebble in a pond and watching the ripples spreading out wider and wider with no end in sight.
I have belonged to on line reading groups who have a particular genre of book or authors to discuss and these are great fun, but I have found (and I know I am not alone in this) that sooner or later one member of a group (and there is always one) will fall out with someone or disagree and take offence and then it is downhill all the way. This does not seem to happen in blogging and I have yet to have a visit or comment from someone that hasn’t been anything but welcome.
Susan Hill has recently got very cross with John Sutherland who apparently has poured scorn on bloggers in this week’s Sunday Telegraph (though she does make it clear that he was pouring more scorn on the reviewers of books on Amazon) and the fact that their influence is spreading. The thrust of her post is that why on earth shouldn’t we write about books we love and how dare this literary critic turn his nose up at us mortals who, let us face it, are the ones who read and buy books.
Each time I read a blog, and read a review or reviews of one or many books, I am simply staggered at the wealth of talent revealed by dedicated readers. No wonder bloggers are being taken seriously. The Guardian does a trawl through the blogs on a Saturday and DoveGreyReader has been quoted by them not once, but twice and by the time I write this, it may even be thrice. So Blogpower reigns and deservedly so.
I know that Litlove has also written about blogging and the friends she has made and how much she appreciates us all and she hoped that after reading her thoughts we were not nauseous but all ‘warm and fuzzy’. Well, I certainly was and I hope that all you great people out there who visit me and leave messages and kind remarks, now feel the same.
I love you all.
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