A public spectacle

I write two blogs as ‘runawaysun’: ‘sunstruck’, an opinionated polemic on world issues which I’ve been writing for two years now; and, more recently, a confessional, chronicled in ‘Unsettled Views’. There was a third – a team blog – titled ‘the immigrant experience’ which was, sadly, discontinued after a year. Some of its posts reflected current immigrant experiences, but the rest was firmly locked into the past.

‘sunstruck’ is rational, assertive and perhaps a little confrontational, bringing out my masculine values. A friend had once commented that ‘sunstruck’ gave her the feeling the blogger was angry and unhappy about the world. She had preferred my ‘the immigrant experience’ posts which were autobiographical fiction. “Nice stories,” she had said. “Ever thought of publishing them in a book?”

“But, they are published!” I had exclaimed. “They are on my blog, dammit!” But she had tut-tutted me out of my elated feelings of being a blogger. “Publishing a book,” she had said, “is at a much higher level. Authoring a book is what makes people famous; not blogging. Blogging is just a public spectacle. Most of it contains meaningless rants. Very little of it gets any readers anyway.”

I thought long and hard about this. And, as I write this post, I’m still reflecting on her words. Could she be right? Does blogging mean nothing in the world of publishing and authorship? Did I know any bloggers who had published books to their credit? Sadly, I couldn’t think of any.