Outsourcing My Blog
Tuesday, December 4, 2007 at 02:21AM 
I've grown bored with my blogging style. My policy, recently, has been to say only nice things about nice people, which means I can't mention two-thirds of the people I'd like to, or say three-quarters of what I'd like.
(You will notice I said nothing at all about the recent Booker Prize, even though the winning book was written by a fellow Irish novelist, I used to share an agent with at least one of the judges, my brother knows another judge, and I had potential gossipy stories coming out my every orifice...)
So while I rethink my blogging style (what do you think, should I revoke the only-say-nice-things rule? Or can anyone think of a new rule that would liven things up?), I've decided to outsource my blog to someone who's much better at blogging than me...
Because this is Berlin, I found myself admiring sculptures of foetuses last Saturday while drinking whisky with Momus. Which led me to visit his magnificent blog, Click Opera. I hadn't been there for a while, and had forgotten how great it is. Much, much more interesting than mine. Go have a wander round it, while I build a new persona.
Meantime, feel free to make recommendations for my new personality, and blog style. What do you like in a blog? This blog? Other blogs?
What does nobody do with their blog, but should?
Reader Comments (8)
The thing is, some of my personality may well come through on the blog, but not all of it. I chucked myself into the internet headfirst this year just to have a splash around and to explore this interesting new world. But a blog is odd.
I speak as though I'm talking to my friends, because I AM talking to my friends. But I'm also talking to a lot of strangers and to anyone who googles anything I talk about. And people look up their own names all the time. So it's like having a pub conversation that is being overheard by everybody you talk about…
For heaven's sake, don't take my blog as any kind of model. It's a form of sickness. I'm stuck in the labyrinth of opinion when I should be plunging into the pungent core of an onion.
Elizabeth, didn't you get outed accidentally, by the technology, a couple of years back? And what was that like, having your personal personality and your lightly fictionalised blog personality brought crashing together in other people's minds? How did you feel? How did they react? Quite a shocking event, psychologically, for a lot of people, I'd imagine. But especially for you.
This all ties in with my interest in the death of privacy, and the new ways of living which it allows / demands... Sigh... I really must blog on this some day...
Yeah, it was very shocking. I had these two completely separate personae and in the one in which I was identified I was doing the good writer thing and making sure I alienated no one, and then in the Fictionbitch I had the knives out....
So now it's simply schizophrenia...
People keep asking me why I don't just have the one blog (now I'm outed) but they have two separate (indeed opposing) functions and styles(promotion and personal diary versus hard-thinking critique), and (as I say) as a result two damn separate personae!!
Now, if people google you, it all comes up in one big pile of stuff, with no context. Google me, and videos of popsongs I recorded when I was nineteen come up alongside essays on tragedy and comedy that I wrote a couple of decades later.
And well-thought-out, much-revised pieces that I'd thought about for years before writing and rewriting them jostle up alongside unthought-out first drafts of vague ideas like this...
And nothing VANISHES anymore.
It's not a bad thing, but it's a new thing, and it's different, and it's interesting. I rather like it, but I don't think we've got the hang of it yet...
We'll have to go a lot easier on our future politicians, for example, or nobody will be clean enough to elect, with their teenage follies scattered in a twenty-year trail all over blogs and myspace and facebook and youtube, every drunken party, snog and joint videoed in wobblevison by their friends and enemies, and saleable years later to the Sun at the right moment...