Author: Tom

Blog.
Its not that it has no end, more importantly it has no beginning, or at least the writer can’t assume that the reader will be aware of anything that’s already been covered. It’s stream of consciousness with memory loss. Each entry must stand on it’s own and can’t necessarily build/rely on anything that comes before it. How does this impact the idea of ‘development’ vs the way we think of it in a written form that we can hold in our hands?

…Blogform and how presentation through time is different from a hard copy…. You can’t assume that a person will start at the beginning as with a handheld tome (blogname: ephemeratome). It imparts an ephemeral feeling to entries; they exist as shards of awareness not necessarily linked or in context with any other entries.
So can you have ‘development’ as an element that you could/would rely on when you could count on people starting at ‘the beginning’? Is development necessary?

Blog: (ephemerrata? Nah… ephemeratome? ‘A’ said it sounded like navel-gazer-itis. Well, I am a navel gazer!)
There are endless questions as to format, but when thinking about a chronology or a relationship to my physical existence, the idea of presenting/shuffling incidents without regard to time/place seems compelling, and it has value in defying a reader’s inclination to pin down the writer or reduce his intent to some binary notion; writer and Intent shouldn’t be the point, at least for what I have in mind. (specifically, throwing together worldwide anecdotes to defy continuity of any kind, partially to compel the reader to continue reading but mostly as it’s thematically relevant ..)
Making a fetish out of this might get tedious though, in a blog. In straight fiction it would be allowable as long as a reader could cull a story from the chaos. It seems better to confuse the reader regarding what my life is, but throw in details that eventually indicate a setting, if not a ‘narrative’.
Why make it more than straight fiction–blog/memoir as fiction? Because life is weightier, and so blog-as-life can be too…because a blog invites autobiography. Why not just straight autobiography? Can’t do that. There’s too much else to tell.

You can catch worthwhile shards and meta-comments and make links to them or put them into categories on the sidebar, or maybe the tagging method, all of which require the reader to take control of his own experience of my writing by choosing what he’d like to read about… (could use the web-site, the root directory, as a place to visually categorize all entries, probably with tags)
Woven into the basic idea of a blog is the control the reader has over his particular experience of it, and that everyone will jump in and out at different points… the thing reads in pieces and how else can it be, with the entry-at-the-top format? No two experiences of it will be the same and no one will ever start at the bottom, guaranteed!
I don’t do the development, the reader does it (or doesn’t do it) based on his interests.
And the context in which your blog exists is: in constant competition with the whole web, for your attention.
Sounds familiar. The blog is like other people’s experience of us. No one knows all of us. People jump in and out of our lives all the time (as we’ll jump in and out of each other’s blogs) and have opinions of us based on incomplete knowledge. No one mourns this; there’s no other way for it to be. What will you do: give people disclaimers and read manifestos to them the moment you meet them? (i.e. ‘development’: before we can proceed I think you have to know this… )
You can give them methods for search that will lead them to what’s relevant to them; it’s like someone asking us a question about us. Still, flow is the natural order of things. Some call that chaos uncomfortable and choose to reduce it. Flow is still the natural order of things. Blog accordingly.
The things that might have some people returning to us with regularity is a style they find engaging and a feeling that our subject matter will be show them something new/interesting. Or not. But anyway, since when do you live or write for an audience?
It had been bothering me that I’d be ‘starting’ a blog and my entries would be made redundant as soon as they slipped below the horizon of the page-top. Will I mourn the passage of time too?

… the implications of acting can’t all be known before you start, and as always it’s no reason not to start.