Fuck. You think you know me but you don’t. How could you? I’ve been a total cock tease. But you don’t know me at all. So here’s another piece:
Although I’m far from routine and I love change and creation, there’s a certain beauty in efficiency. I read a LOT of blogs. And I’ve established a useful routine to quickly get a glimpse at what I’m looking at whenever I check out a blog I haven’t seen before (by the way, leave me a link to yours and I’ll be sure to stop by; the more interesting your comment is, the faster I’ll beat a path to you and whatever it is you offer):
1. Theme.
Is it navigable? Is it predictable? (please give me something that sets you apart!) Do I like the colors or are they, frankly, boring? What can I tell about you from the header? (for instance, are you a dime-a-dozen stab-me-in-the-eye-because-you’re-boring-as-hell-when-you-talk-about-that-cute-thing-your-kid-said mommyblogger? I can spot you and your custom header a mile away. If that’s not you, carry on.) Is your site cluttered up with every badge and ad known to the universe?
I know you’re proud of your blog, but look at it from the eye of someone who doesn’t care about you. Like me.
Oh, and if you are still using Blogger, you’re an amateur. I won’t even mention MySpace (without suppressing my gag reflex).
2. Writing Quality
Fuck, people, this goes without saying, but…spell-check your fucking posts! And learn something about grammar! Not sure where to put your commas, if at all? Not sure what a run-on sentence is and if you commit them? Don’t know what a sentence looks like that you end a preposition with? Then LOOK IT UP, PEOPLE! Before you put yourself out there be sure you are delivering a quality product.
[eye roll]
Which leads me to the writing itself. You can have lovely spelling and dainty little-finger-lifted grammar, but boring is boring is boring. Is boring. Seriously. You would not BELIEVE the huge number of fucking abhorrent eye-bleeds of blogs that clutter up the wasteland that is teh innernets*. Don’t be that. Learn to write a sentence, a paragraph, that’s compelling. One that makes people want to read the next one, and the next.
You can practice here. And you can read this. Don’t like those? There are only a zillion other examples of really good writing out there. Find some and study them. Take bits and make them your own. And practice. Pretend you don’t know your story and are stumbling onto it for the first time. Write for the person who doesn’t know you. Or care. Like me.
Make me care.
Oh, and for those who snivel, “I’m only writing for myself so it doesn’t matter!”, YOU LIE!! If you were only writing for yourself then you’d be writing in some spiral-bound blank doodle book with pictures of uber-cute puppies cavorting all over the cover, making little circles over your lower-case i’s and stashing the whole thing under your bed so Mom won’t find out you that went to 3rd base already. If you were only writing for yourself you wouldn’t be writing a fucking PUBLIC BLOG. So stop lying to yourself.
3. About Me
I love breaking rules, especially my own, but you need something somewhere that tells people Who.You.Are. You need people to care. But don’t do the whole TMI thing, please. (Unless that’s your “thing.” But only make it your “thing” if you’re really really sure you can pull it off. Otherwise, steer clear of TMI.)
Think about who you are. You’d think this’d be obvious, but there are tens of thousands of bloggers out there inflicting themselves on the world who have no fucking clue who they are. And that’s okay in a cute bumbling self-explorative way, but … it gets old. So allow for change, check in with yourself once in awhile, and show who you are becoming.
Write it down. I totally go right for the About Me page every single time. I want to know who I’m dealing with. I read about the top three posts (unless they’re fucking novels, in which case I scroll down for the punch line and get out before the Tentacle of Blog Boredom slithers through the screen of my Macbook and pulls me in. No way do I want to get sucked into somebody’s annals of banality), have a look at the blogroll to see who else they read, and then go right for About Me. So make yours entertaining. Make me want to comment.
4. Comments
Everybody knows its a sad sad blog post when the only comment is from Aunt Martha or BFF Jen/Jess/Heather. Don’t be that. A hallmark of a good blog is the quality of the comments. Good bloggers foster a sense of community, or at least enough snark in their responses to make you want to check back and see what they said to yours. Good bloggers also write about stuff that’s interesting enough to generate interesting comments. So make it easy. I’l be judging you.
But what about you, Bitch?
Yeah. What about me.
1. Where do you live?
In a city of glass, where the homeless root through that day’s recycling. And there’s wifi. And sushi.
2. What’s your real name?
Fuckmenow. My porn name is Fifi LaBouche.
3. Were you kidding about your shoe size?
Not at all.
4. What makes you so special?
I’m little. Yellow. Different.
5. Really?
Of course not. I’m an anorexic Amazon. But like I said before, I am like no one you know, and I am like everyone you know. I just say it out loud.
*irony is in this year.
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