Can You Stay For Dinner?

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 05:45 PM PDT

Friends, it's been nine whole days since I last posted. What's interesting here is not that I've been swept up in the process of writing a memoir, no, what's interesting is that despite how much you mean to me, despite the fact that none of my writing would mean a damn thing if it weren't for you here reading it,

I've been out of touch, and worse,

I've let us both down. Again.

For about three months now I've had this feeling that all the meaningful writing I do should be for the book. I'd explain it as: the blog and the book both need food, and I'm only serving the best of it to the book, thinking of the book somehow as more important, more deserving.

The truth of it is, both need care, both need nurturing and all manner of delicious. I can't give to one and not the other, when both exist because of writing, and both exist because of your reading.

I've written an apology like this before, with a promise to be better at checking in more often, but I haven't kept it. This time, I mean to.

From now on, you and I won't go more than 48 hours without communicating. When I started this thing, I posted three times per day. 2010 was mayhem of the mind. I knew then, that building any connection with others grew from frequent, consistent communication. Over the years, I've lessened the frequency, the rigidity, but not the passion for what I do here. In the blogworld, there exists a debate between quality and quantity, even though the two aren't mutually exclusive. Quality of posts being how good, how meaningful each blog post is. Quantity of posts being how many blog posts there are in a day, in a week, in a month. As a blogger, of course we aim for quality. It is the content, after all, that matters.

Bloggers vary in what they perceive quality to be, and how often they can produce quality work. However, knowing that readers prefer regularity of posting, or being reliable in terms of what you produce and when, some find that quantity is slightly more important than quality. They know that content, perhaps of any kind, is better than stagnation. A post is better than no post.

Other bloggers are against this. They do not post just for the sake of posting.

I fall somewhere in between these two camps. At first thought, it may seem obvious that putting out posts just for the sake of having more on your blog is distasteful, a bit insincere. Readers want bloggers who care, bloggers who respect them enough to not simply consider their readership as pageviews.

This is true. However, and this is important,

bloggers who post frequently, who check in consistently- sometimes with long ones, sometimes with simple, 'oh hey!' ones- they're extremely caring,

they just care in an outwardly different looking way. I'd explain my appreciation for frequent posters in terms of friendship. In the following example, you are the blogger and your friends are the readers.

Friendship, like blogging, is about interacting. Sometimes it's about meaningful heart to heart experiences, sometimes it's about quirky, spontaneous ones, and sometimes it's about nothing more than being around. If you only contacted your friends when you had something meaningful, something important, to tell them (as in a quality crafted blog post), your relationship wouldn't be as dynamic. You wouldn't talk as often, and maybe, you wouldn't get to know the intricacies of each other.

We all know that as friends, the best ones are serious and funny and odd. They call you just to tell you that they saw a sign on the highway and it reminded them of you. They check in frequently, on Mondays and Wednesdays, and Thursday afternoons, just to tell you how badly they want a cupcake, how seriously they hate their boss, how much they love you, how often they're tempted by the daily deals on CheapCaribbean.com.

As friends, we feel good knowing that we're included in the daily lives of the ones we love, no matter how mundane. We matter in small times and big ones.

This is how I think a blog and reader relationship should work.

Because truly,

honest to my sweet pug's delicate lady ears,

I think about you all the time.

At least ten times a day. I'll find myself grocery shopping, in aisle six with my paws on a new product, and think that you might have tried it. I wonder if you liked it. I'll find myself on a walk, thinking about how much I hate when people walking in front of me stop in the middle of the sidewalk and don't move to the side in consideration of others behind them. I'll wonder if you hate that too. I'll find myself reading an article about a celebrity on a diet, and I'll want to tell you what I think of it. I'll wonder what you think, too. I'll cook a meal that costs very little calorically yet tastes like a million bucks, and I'll want to take a picture of it just to show you. I'll want you to taste it off of my fork, even though that's a little more intimate than we're used to. I'll find myself depressed, and I'll want to talk it through, with you. I'll be shocked beyond shocked when 273 of you can relate.

I want to love what I'm sharing with you, want to feel like each post means something to me and to you, but I also just want to be in touch. So I'm figuring out a way to be the writer, the blogger, that you come here to read while also being the friend I want to be.

And what I'm really saying is,

I'm sorry for being an inconsistent friend, a sporadic blogger and

I'm sorry for thinking the book mattered more, because we both know it doesn't, and

I'm sorry for thinking you wouldn't be satisfied with just anything I'd think to share. Because maybe you would. And in that case, maybe I wouldn't overwhelm myself so much, so often.

I'm here again. Fingers crossed, for good.

**Note:The photos in this post are random ones I take with my phone on a daily basis. Though nearly incoherent and unintelligible, I'll be honest in telling you that they're fairly representative of me. They make even less sense than the outfit I'm wearing right now. I'm sorry and you're welcome.