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In this post, I’d tell you a little story about our dog Ditton. How fearful she is about bathing and how this relates to me as newbie blogger.
First things first, Ditton is an askal. A local variety of dog common in the streets in the Philippines. Pedigreed or not, the summer heat beats down on all of us. Today being a Sunday I have scooped Ditton up from his doghouse to give her a bath. She resisted me and wailed for all she’s got – you would have thought I’d been prepping him up for dinner.
I suffered scratches from all her flailing about. She made up for all the aggravation when she licked me all over after I was done bathing her.
I’m telling you this little story because this was how I used to feel on my scheduled posting day. I used to drag my ass to the desktop to get my post done. Must be stage fright – the thought of a global audience can freeze any timid soul. And the peanut gallery might not take kindly to my half-baked ideas. Those kind of silly fears.
Four months hence, I’m eying deadlines with a lot less fear and irritation. I have hit my blogging rhythm. There’s nothing like a supportive community of readers to keep you going. Even on my non-blogging days I feel an unexplained hunger to dash off a few notes to my readers. Blog post ideas swirl thickly about my head in my work and even when I try to sleep. I’ve even dreamed about writing risque posts and be laughed at out loud in the social media.
Have I tamed the online beast?
Not quite. But I have learned to work around it to get things done.Don’t look now, but I have won over my habit of checking my AdSense earnings every single day – I haven’t looked in the last two months. I can’t give up checking Google Analytics though. If I do, how else will I find out that a lot of you, dear readers, are driving modest traffic to my blog. You not only fulfill my need for conversations, but you’re also sending warm bodies to this quiet blog. Thank you, thank you.
To this day, I still haven’t lifted a finger to understand SEO and all that mumbo jumbo so I will be loved by Google. Of course, Google still doesn’t love me. I’m grateful, however, for some unexpected morsels that dropped my way from the bounteous Google table. It has rewarded me with a Page Rank 2.
I’m as perplexed as you are, my friends. Perhaps it’s Google way of saying I had better stay put in Blogger? Whatever, Matt. Just a thought: I would have a made a post myself had I got a Page Rank 0 – that it’s no skin off my nose. Just want to make that clear. I’m capable of that, too.
I have learned to value what is essential to my blogging. Frankly, I don’t live for these metrics. I have found my self-worth on the things I write about and the conversations that spring from them. There’s value in those interaction. I’d rather write for you. I have no love lost for a machine no matter how semantically gifted its algorithm may be.
Clarity of purpose. I started this blog writing on whatever caught my fancy. Three months hence, I have narrowed my focus on three things: writing, blogging, and the social media. Who knows much farther down the road I’d train my sights on a few more, or lose one or the other. The essential thing is that I write about things that make my heart leap to my throat, right?
At the core of the things I love is writing. We have a tenuous hold on life in this planet, living as we are on borrowed time. I just hope that in this short stint it will have been said – in my lifetime – that writing defines me. It’s all I ask.
Sean Platt who writes posts as perfect as a boquet of flowers has this to say about writing:
Language is the landscape, populating the white space of an otherwise empty page. Our ideas are the seeds we plant and our words are the blossoms in spring time.
For the rest of this blog’s natural life, I’d do my best to be more lucid as a writer. Like Sean. Because I’d like to gift you with those blossoms in spring time, too. Failing that, I’m not above dragging myself like I did to our dog Ditton for a quick dip to clear the cobwebs in this aging brain.
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