Blogging takes a lot more dedication. When I was gifted with the Kenning blog I did immediately try and find a "formula" of sorts because frankly, when you are told to write "whatever you want to write, it doesn't even have to be about poetry" a) that opens up the field far too wide, and b) it's not exactly the best course for a blog attached to a literary journal to not address similar items to the journal. I still use the "three poems" formula, I call it my "schtick," but even relatively early on I started branching out - mostly including news or popular events that I thought poet-readers would be interested in. Now I generally have a pattern: a post about three poems that cluster around a topic, then something else - interview, news, opinion - then three poems again. I was talking to a fiction writer who said she couldn't sustain blogging, but that part of this was the fact that if she had an hour to write, she felt she should be using it for her work, not for blogging about her work. I explained that for me I use the Kenning Blog to force me to consume large amounts of poetry and maintain an awareness of what's going on in the "indie" or small-press poetry world. I know both of those things are important, but it's easier to underline their necessity when I have (admittedly self-imposed) deadlines. Don't be fooled. That Kenning blog is as much for my own benefit and education as any of my readers'. It's really nice when it's read and discussed and I love that, but if no one read it I'd still be gaining a lot from the experience. I don't think I could blog casually, like about my life and stuff. Some people really take to it, but in a way I have always felt it's a way to garner attention to yourself. Who really wants to read about my day-to-day mundanities?
I definitely agree with that last point, for sure. And even specializing on a topic for my blog, I struggle to find a reason to write unless I have something high-quality or high-effort to write about. I'll sometimes write quick-thoughts about a particular topic, and find myself not too satisfied about what I've come up with. And those posts I don't even attempt to post on Hubski, I just leave them on the blog for someone to stumble upon. However I do like blogging more than Twitter. Besides the stalking thing we discussed yesterday (haha), I also find that I'm happier when someone comments on my blog. Quickly going through my tweets through twitter and favoriting whatever I've written doesn't take that much effort. But actually going through and reading a longer blog post and commenting on it in turn makes me feel like they've taken more than a moment of their time to consider what I'm saying, which sort of validates my post to begin with.
For me, I like what blogging makes me do, or rather the effects of blogging. For a typical post I generate an idea (usually I have lists of ideas hidden on scrap paper in various notebooks, to be honest, but they have been generated at some prior point), I conduct "research sessions" aka "quality time with google", I'd say on average spending 2 hours doing so, then I cull through the best sources. Finally after that I get down to the writing! Then after a few days I edit the post at least once, but I edit more for style than to cut word count. Finally it all goes up on Wordpress...And then I have to socialize it against three or four different kinds of media! It's work. But moreover, the process of finding, reading, revisiting, and reiterating information in my own words is really like - an ideal learning process for me, I think. When you can explain a concept to someone else, that's when you've truly learned it. I think that's what I find rewarding about my blog posts, I know that each one represents a culmination of at least a few hours' work and its existence is a digital representation of my continued self-education. Sometimes I write up like, two or three drafts in a weekend and sit on them, releasing one a week. Othertimes I get behind and it takes me two weeks to post again :) As for blogging vs. Twitter, I love Twitter but I just use it completely differently. Twitter is for out-of-context quips, mostly. (I'm good at quips, I need a place for them to go!) I've heard Twitter called "micro-blogging" and that just seems very foreign to me. Edit: Anyway, clearly I love to ramble on and on about Kenning, the blog, and my process. Sorry for all of that haha. I guess it's my enthusiasm coming through.