Some new things have happened to me since I started keeping this blog. I think it’s changed me a little bit. I suppose that every new venture we try has that power.

The first thing that I notice is that I’ve been writing more. I’ve tried to keep journals, but they always get lost or abandoned. This one is different. Having an audience, even a silent audience, or even something as tentative as a potential audience, makes the writing seem more important than if I was simply writing it in a notebook. One of the things that happens when people write more is that they begin to think more about writing, which means that when you aren’t actually writing you might be thinking about what you could write. Planning. It’s kind of like cooking. If you have to prepare meals for other people on a regular basis, you need to start thinking about what you are going to feed them. When I’m not near a computer, I have a little notebook that I write things down in. It’s interesting to me because I’ve become more conscious of what I’m thinking about as I go through the day, instead of just going through the day. So blogging is causing me to become more reflective.

After doing a broad survey of what other people are blogging about, I began to consider which blogs I like to return to and why. The main thing for me is the voice of the author. To a certain limit, I don’t really care what anyone writes about. I do read some for the content alone. But other blogs are compelling because the author has a good way of saying whatever is important at that moment.

From that little thoughtwave came the idea that blogs are really a lot like essays. Blogs may actually be a new literary genre. When people describe blogs as “online journals,” that doesn’t quite capture the spirit of what a blog can be. I don’t know if blogs can be easily characterized with a comparison to conventional literary forms.

Because of this thinking, my reading habits have shifted a bit. I went to the library and started looking for personal essays. I wanted to soak up the styles of different authors who are accomplished essayists. So I’ve been reading essays. I even read the Declaration of Independence all the way through a couple of weeks ago because I ran across it in an essay anthology that I found at Gullivers. Not exactly the coolest thing to read, but I thought about how it must have sounded at the time. I was imagining that Jefferson wrote it as a blog post. In that light, it gained some of what I imagine may have been its original punch.

It even looks a little bit like a blog - a long skinny web page.