Good Old British Bloggers

blog

Spelled [blawg, blog] noun, verb, blogged, blog·ging.

Noun. Weblog. Example: The blogger blogged about his books.

Let us remember the days when our opinions were wasted on our peers and our poetry was destined never to see the light of day; a pencil scrawl in a diary. The days when we transported music on a cassette that held only fourteen tracks and waited for hours outside Woolies for a friend to turn up, because we had no means of sending a message asking ‘WHR R U? IM COLD N ALONE. LOL.’ Now look at us, typing our every incidental thought and contemplation onto a web log, for the world to peruse.

According to Completelynovel.com, in 2010 there were over ten thousand published and unpublished authors blogging their wares online. This is the precise equivalent of the town of Wells hollering the contents of their 1989 diaries really loudly. The numbers will almost certainly have risen since then, with the result possibly being, at least, akin to the inhabitants of the town of Stowmarket travelling the planet with a megaphone and their poetry in tow. Nonetheless, blogging is now considered to be an art in itself, so much so that Completelynovel ran the Author Blog Awards in 2010, in an effort to reward writers for ‘engaging’ with their readers. The internet has certainly made this engagement real and easier to accomplish; far easier than travelling the entire world donning a sandwich board emblazoned with literary musings.

So, does a writing blog or book blog make a writer more accessible, or less exclusive? A combination of the two, I would suggest. Being in a fortunate enough position to hole oneself away, knowing that the public want to read your words so much that they don’t care they don’t get any for free must be a wonderful position to be in. But, for the rest of us, a blog is an effective means of transporting our ideas to the populous. And far, far easier than wandering the world barefoot with a megaphone and some hastily photocopied diary pages.

Karina Evans