Graceful Parenting in Austin

I’m a new blogger and trying to learn how to do it well and trying to build relationships with other bloggers and I’ve read the many blogs about blogging and they all say I need to comment on blogs that are similar to mine.

This makes me feel like a shady PR firm hiding a client’s dirty secrets or a Hollywood starlet who has been seeing a young man who is much too young. It makes me want to say “No Comment!”

Technorati Tags: blogging

I have all sorts of opinions, but they are slow opinions. I’ll read a new post and I’ll have some ideas but I’ll want to think about them for a while. Then I might start to write something and I’ll edit some, but I’ll want to save a draft and come back and you can’t do that. After a few days I will have a better way to say it and by the end of the week I’ll think my comment is just about ready to go, but then, you know how it is, no one is hanging around that post anymore.

When I was a young girl, I remember a very specific vision I had for myself of being on the Donahue show and he asks me a very difficult question. I am able to express myself clearly and while everyone doesn’t agree with me, they all understand. I still have this wish, to be able to make some sense of the chaos in my mind, a sense that makes sense to others. But I have done it through writing instead of speaking and writing up until now has been slow. When I need to respond quickly, I still feel like the young girl who thinks of the great response to a rude remark three days too late.

And I think the comment karma of blogging is in effect, because I get a lot of visits and page views to my blog, but not many comments. (Maybe ya’ll find it hard too?)

I have had the same trouble with my own posts. My Jamie Lynn Spears post was about two weeks late and I do best with book reviews, when you can’t tell how long I took to think about it. But I have gotten better with posts. One late night last week, I managed to get a post up about Barak Obama’s Yes We Can video on the same day I learned about it. It was quite an accomplishment!

And I managed to get two comments up on BlogHer in the past few days on recent posts, without taking a week to think about it. I was a little nervous, putting my ideas out there in such a hurried rush, without all the proper thinking-it-through, but I think I managed not to say something ridiculous.

So, for now, I’m going to work on some timely comments so I can be an active member of the blogging community for now and when Donahue (I mean, Oprah) calls, I won’t be tempted to say “no comment,” I’ll be ready.