WHERE DO ALL THE BLOGGERS GO?

I've been a little concerned of late because one of my favorite blogs I follow, over on the Yang side, hasn't been updated for a couple of months. I am reluctant to de-link it, partly because I still go there to look at his photos, and I enjoy his music links. He never writes much --pictures being worth a thousand words, to someone somewhere. This guy has a photographic style that is unusual, like you are really looking out of his head, and over time you get a sense of who he might be. (A French socialist with great taste in music, possibly a doctor, but more likely a patient? A lot of photos from pharmacy and outpatient departments. His last photos include a hospital room. Not encouraging. If anyone knows his condition, I would love to know.)

Another blog I find interesting is so sporadic I wonder if he even tries anymore, but once a month or so, he pops up with something. I feel an affinity for him because his blog started just about the time mine did; I discovered his in a mutual link. He is surprising and sensitive and honest, but not very regular. (I suspect he is a very busy man with a family and a demanding job.) Not that I am so daily, but it is a habit you must cultivate just by doing. On the other hand, if you're not COMPELLED to blog, then you're not a blogger.

I recently* read Stephen King's ambiguously* encouraging On Writing book, and have been thinking about someone else's comment --writing isn't about having something interesting to say, it's about making anything you say interesting. A friend once told me in college when I was the school paper's editor, that I "could write with my mind tied behind my back." That's a backhanded compliment, but he thought what I wrote was interesting anyway.

There are a few things about Stephen King's style that bother me, but I've never read one of his books without pretty much barreling through it in just one or two sittings. And I just learned that Anthony Trollope wrote ALL THE TIME with daily quotas. (Stephen King does the same thing.) Not only did Trollope invent the English letterbox, which at the time was a revolution like having email--providing efficient private and direct correspondence--but he also might be credited with an early paradigm of the laptop computer. He built a little portable writing desk that he carried everywhere. He wrote on commuter trains or wherever he had spare time. It was all by hand, and on the road he used a pencil so he didn't have to worry about running out of ink, the equivalent of a battery failure.

But I digress.

I worry about my missing or absent bloggers. In the blogosphere (what a creepy word), we exist only in our posts. To be sure, on the positive yang side, assuming the servers keep working, there's a kind of immortality there. But in the end, we don't even know who cares.

*Mr. King would really like me to edit out these adverbs, feeling they are unnecessary. But I like adverbs, and the passive voice, too, where appropriate. But I think I know how to use them effectively. (Ooops.)