Hobby Discussion Day 6: Blogging

I like to write a lot. I always have. I consider writing to be one of my only talents in life, and if you think I lack talent when it comes to writing, keep it to yourself. Bitch.

Here's the problem: I do not have the right personality to be a professional writer. On paper, writing professionally sounds like kind of a glamorous life, the kind of life where you could sit on your enclosed sun porch with your laptop, a fat sleeping cat, and a cup of tea while you write the day away. But I do not have an enclosed sun porch, and that's why professional writing doesn't suit me.

Actually, professional writing doesn't suit me because I don't handle rejection well. I am very thin-skinned and take everything personally. I tried to pitch stories to a few magazines once, and got either rejected or ignored, and I just gave up on my writing career then and there. And yeah, yeah, I know, J.K. Rowling got rejected 75 times before she found a publisher for Harry Potter, and that automatically means that all people who get rejected are destined to eventually become mega-millionaire literary superstars.

Anyway. I do not like rejection. So I'm keeping writing as a hobby. I probably wouldn't enjoy it that much if I did it professionally anyway, because it's all fun and games until something becomes your job.

And thankfully, in this day and age, any amateur writer can publish his or her own blog ... for free! Plus maybe some literary agent will just be tooling around the World Wide Web one day and stumble upon your blog, love it, and offer you a huge book deal! Especially when you've admitted that you're thin-skinned and probably an editor's worst nightmare!

The thing is, as much as I joke about them, blogs serve a useful purpose. I think ... and here is where I state something that everybody already knows ... but I think that the ability for real-life people to talk about their real lives has provided a major source of support for the rest of us real-life people. Hence, the mom blog industry. Ten years ago, I don't think there were a lot of opportunities for actual moms to vent about their actual lives, which means that there were a lot of other moms out there thinking they were the only people who had the particular problems that they did. And yes, pre-blogs you would probably vent to your friends, but I think it takes the anonymity of the Internet to truly open up about your feelings.

But since reading and writing blogs has sort of become a form of no-cost therapy, I also think that sometimes blogging is not so much a hobby for me as it is a medically-necessary cathartic experience. I don't usually find blogging to be an escape, so much as it is an outlet. Which also means that blogging can make you get bogged down in your own petty problems. Therefore, I need to keep the amount of time I spend writing and reading blogs in reason. (Also I could invent a new term: blogged down.)

Which does not mean anybody should stop reading my blog! I need the 6 readers I can get! (Yes, I did add one more hypothetical reader since the last time I made that same self-deprecating remark.) And thank you for joining me on my 6-day discussion of my hobbies. I will talk to you again tomorrow, when I'll have a whole new topic to write about.