Day 4: Explore the Neighborhood

“Blogging is a communal experience; if you didn’t want anyone to read your posts or interact with you, you’d keep a private diary… Today, you begin the process of engaging with the blogging community, a key step of building an audience.”

Today’s assignment: follow five new topics in the Reader, and begin finding blogs (and bloggers) you love.

I’ve been here a little over a week I think.

Found some AWESOME blogs to follow already! My blogging friend gave me that assignment on my very first day here.

Check. Day 4 done.

So I thought I’d “explore the neighborhood” some in the folks that have found me here on my crazy little farm.

Anddd…soo..yeahhh..ummm…

About that.

I guess it makes sense that stepping onto the worldwide web would bring out opportunistic internet salespeople and make them glom on just like they do when you make a ton of online orders right before Christmas and then notice that your email is getting an extraordinarily high number of spam mail come January.

I get it.

But I guess there was an itty bitty part of my tender writer’s heart that thought this was going to be a cozy little place where all of us author wanna-be folks sat around with our doodled up notebooks and our skinny lattes and oohed and aahhed as we read each others brilliant words and passages and pieces.

Yeah. Not so much.

Where do these folks come from anyway?

And why do I have to have them taking up space around our little writing table with their internet sales pitches and their fake profiles that hide their pornographic websites?

You know the ones….they don’t even bring a coffee to the table.

No profile or website other than either a) a grainy pic that looks like it was snapped in someone’s basement or b) a “studio” pic that could be taken off a local real estate agent’s business card or c) a high adventure photo that includes white sand, snowboarding, coastal resorts or tan people in bikinis.

I’m fixin to cry here. I thought this gig would be me, some of my bffs, and a few new friends I’d make on blogosphere. And my high school English teacher of course.

Not single men looking for women or single women looking for love or photos of people who supposedly travel the world and do all the amazing-incredible-you’ve-not-lived-life-until-you’ve-lived-like-me sorts of jobs that us normal everyday boring in the dark schmucks like me are just waiting to sign up for so we can give up the drab nothingness we’ve lived so far and FINALLY have the life we’ve always dreamed of.

Puh-leeze.

Sigh.

{{Sip the latte}}

This must make me a Pollyanna amateur writer wanna-be, thinking this would be a great place to network, write, grow, sharpen my skills and learn how to start giving a little more time to the writer side of me.

Is this really how it is now?

Everyone after an easy buck?

Everyone glomming onto the coattails of other people so they can tout their get-rich-quick bs?

Ah, the bitter taste of disillusionment.

I’ll stick to my coffee thank you very much.

How funny is it that my husband tells me “if you want people to read your writing you have to put it in a place where people can read it.”

And by putting it in a place where folks can read it, I’m sitting among folks who have no interest in reading it.

This makes me mad. Mad for me, who gives darn good time to stringing these here words out, and mad for all the folks here who do the same. Flamin mad I tell ya.

But then I go peek through my itty bitty list. And not everyone’s a Take Advantage Of kind of follower.

There are some here in this place who LOVE writing.

Who LOVE catching up on the world via blogs.

Who LOVE sharing their words and honing their skill.

Who LOVE encouraging others.

Who LOVE me.

And THAT right there is why I’ll stay.

That right there is why I’ll  continue to blog and if you want to bring your nasty and your schemes and your sales pitch I will let you sit here because I have to, it’s a public blog after all, but I don’t have to listen to your attempts to take advantage of me, or anyone else here in this community. While I understand you need to make a living, the rest of us are here for the reasons of wanting to write, wanting to share, wanting to learn, wanting to grow and wanting to read what others have to say.

There’s no coat tails in them there reasons.

So.

Go on and jump off your ski slopes in British Columbia, and go on and bed the woman of your dreams in Bali.

But me?

Me and my friends, well we’ll be right here, writing our little  hearts out and living this boring old writer’s blogging life just like everybody else.

And we’ll be loving it.

© Cassandra Rankin, This Crazy Little Farm

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