Kim's Craft Blog Has a Birthday!

That first post still shows up on my Blogger dashboard, with the date of 10/16/08. Exactly one year ago this past Friday, the day I began writing Kim's Craft Blog. It's hard to remember exactly what was going through my mind at that point. What did I think I was doing? I remember having the urge to write about the issues that were coming up in my fall writing workshops. And also feeling rather desperate to join the digital age, which seemed to be doing its best to leave me behind. I also think that I had some rather strange ideas about blogging before I actually started doing it, many of them quite silly and contradictory. With half my mind I would worry--feeling humiliated in advance--that nobody but my husband and best friends will ever read this, while the other half of my brain was imagining sponsors showering gifts upon my crystalline prose before I had penned a single post.

The actual experience of blogging has of course turned out to be quite different from anything I possibly could have imagined, and I feel grateful to have been able to experience it "from the inside." For one thing, blogging is a more communal activity than I otherwise would have understood--where the blogs and writers covering a given area have a constant conversation going on with each other, through reading each others' posts, commenting, and following unfolding events via Twitter and other social media outlets. Once you begin participating in this exchange of information, you very much have the sense of being caught up in a lively, fast-moving river of discussion, opinion and instant reaction, and I have found this activity to be quite addicting. I have to remind myself that I don't need to be participating at every moment. That it's okay just to "check in" from time to time and see what's going on.

It's funny looking back at that first post, and to see how determinedly I was still addressing it to the students in my fall classes. You can see that I didn't yet have the confidence just to write to whoever might be reading online. I couldn't imagine that there really would be other breathing humans out there. Over the course of the past year I have discovered that there are indeed lots of other writers out there, many of them with their own blogs, and that, yes, there is an audience for a blog like this one. I rather belatedly came to understand the art of "commenting"--which I learned is a reciprocal sport. You are more likely to get comments on your blog if you have already been commenting on the blogs of others, and have been participating meaningfully in the conversation.

Somewhere along the way, I got far too busy and distracted with blogging to worry about trying to make it pay. While I certainly haven't been opposed to making money from this blog in principle, I have also found that I didn't want to compromise my opinions about the books I was discussing by accepting freebies, or to clutter up the aesthetic of my beach photographs with advertisements. Interestingly, the new FTC Rules are actually forcing me to revisit this issue by making me consider whom I link to and what my "disclosures" ought to say. Do I declare myself entirely nonprofit and influence-free? Or should I begin looking at possible sources of funding, such as Google Ads, donations, or becoming an affiliate for an online bookstore like Amazon? By December 1 when the new rules take effect, I suppose I shall have to decide. In a funny way, it feels like this blog is "growing up." Well, happy birthday, dear blog. I will be interested to see what the future holds.