By Brandal Campbell
In response to another blogger’s question: What made you feel good this year? I posted the following on my blog, Foreign Quang (http://foreignquang.blogspot.com)
Oh, gosh, I just have to tell you what made me feel good this year. Blogging. No kidding.
I’ve loved writing ever since I was a scrawny, stringy-haired, four-eyed, buck-toothed teen. Snippets of tales appeared in my head, begging to be woven into a real live story. Day after day, details gelled in my mind, until several months later the story was complete.
None of them are finalized in print; I find it difficult to know which of my many characters deserve the honor of being in my first novel. Do I start with my oldest character first? My latest characters—the ones whose complete story appeared to me in a dream? The characters who would seem most interesting to others?
It’s hard to play favorites and decide who gets to go first, so instead, I blog. (Besides, with the exception of two, all my stories are romances--Ugh, right?) Blogging has satisfied that need that won’t go away, the need to be verbal. The need to use words in a new way. Besides the joy of putting finger pressure to keyboard (remember when we used to say “put pen to paper?”), blogging makes me feel good in other ways.
A blog feels like a home in space. There is a place I can always go to express myself without anyone telling me to be quiet. The people who visit me in my space-home are there because they help my home feel complete. The only people I close my door to are those who invade, uninvited, trying to use my comment box as a place to sell their wares. I close the door in their faces. Delete. Gone. My home is my place to enjoy people who are truly likeable and very lovable. They come into my home and leave a piece of themselves for me to enjoy, ponder, laugh at, and cry with. They are like the family members of this home in space. Quangsters.
I like learning new things. At my home in space I have learned to redecorate (thank you, Blogger.com for making it free and easy.) I have learned to scrape up old linoleum and place down tile, so to speak. I’ve learned to do things like link to another website, resize photos, copy html, work with advertisers, chat with the guests in my home and be a good guest at someone else’s home in space.
I’ve discovered joy in fun little things: Daily looking at my Google Analytics map to see where on this planet my visitors were from that day, checking my Gmail account to see who left a new comment on my blog, seeing that I set a new record for how many people visited in one day, hearing a comment from a brand new reader and learning what combination of words people typed into Google to find my site.
I feel good when I get to come to your blog to visit. You will never know how much you’ve inspired me or made me a better writer. You've always made me feel wanted. *Sniff*
I like knowing that as much as I have learned by blogging, I have tons more to accomplish. For example, I want to learn someday how to be more creative with my blog header and sidebar titles. There are people whose blogs I visit and wonder, “Hey! How’d they do that?” (See the header and/or sidebar titles of Controlling my Chaos, Sisters’Stuff, and Dream a Little Dream.)
I want to learn how to get my header in the center of my blog. It’s in the center when I look at my blog, but when I move to Computer Geek’s [my husband’s online alias] monitor, my header justifies left.
I want to find out why FeedBurner hates me. Some of you are old enough Quangsters to remember that no matter how many new readers FeedBurner said I gained that day, the next day FeedBurner would always say I had one reader. Well that glitch seemed to have solved itself. Now it’s stuck on four. No matter how many new readers I get in a day, the next day it will always say I have four readers. I’ll get excited some mornings because I’ll think FeedBurner has unstuck me—it’ll say I have 7 readers, or 5 readers, or 9 readers! But next morning? Back to four. Always eternally back to four. Aargh. But you know what? Whoever the four of you are, I love you!
