Becoming a Blogger

When I started publishing my writing on my website, I was told by a few people that I had to write shorter articles.  A blog entry should be no more than 400 words.  I immediately felt chastened and for the next few weeks, I tried hard to restrain myself when I was writing.  It was a disaster.  No matter how hard I tried, my articles ended up with too many words.

Maybe this has something to do with being female.  When our friends came back from their trip to California, we heard two different accounts of their adventures.  The first version was from the female point of view and included a wonderful description of the disasters they encountered as they house-sat; including the dog being sprayed by a skunk and the washing machine overflowing and flooding the studio.  There was more to the story and I delighted in listening to it all.

The male version was somewhat different.  "We had an exciting holiday in California and we are very glad to be home."  That was it.

In regards to my articles, I decided that whatever rules were being tossed around about "blogging", who was going to enforce them?  I'm not getting paid to write so there isn't an editor telling me what to do, either.  I figured I could do what I'd like and my articles could be as short or long as I wanted them to be.  Oddly enough, the people who told me to write short articles were reading my long ones regularly, without complaint.  My articles just weren't blog-worthy.  So, I decided not to have a blog. I'd have an online journal instead.  That's my Studio Foxhoven website through Squarespace.

So, why am I here?   Well, first of all, it is free.  Then I puttered around and found that I could create a blog page that matches my business card almost perfectly.  Wow.

I also realized that Blogger was popular and included stuff that I could not do on my website, like match my business cards.  I can have a feed directly from my website, so you will be able to access all my articles from here, as well as anything else from my website.  I'll try to be good and make my posts 400 words or less.

We'll see how it goes! 

I won't do twitter, though.  I don't want my writing turned into tweets.

More to come....