Let's Get Personal

So several of you have asked me (and I mean way more than three of you when I say that) if I might be willing to open the door just a tiny bit wider to some more personal life events here on this blog.  "I'm really interested in you as a person," you've said.  At least some of you.  And in the last two months, I've had a few W.A.W. Mailbox questions that weren't much more than "Will you tell us more about you."

It's not just a vocal few either.  The page view numbers I get from my analytics every time I write something a little more personal certainly suggest that the interest is actually there.  My baby shower post last week isn't going to break any records, but it got about three times the view of an average post.

And I am nothing if not an unrepentant whore for page views.

First of all, let me just tell you that I know what's going on here.  I know you're talking about that tool who runs around looking like me.  Mr. Non-W.A.W. Chris.  It's him you're all interested in and his stupid pathetic life.  I pretty much hang out here at the Writing About Writing compound all day--like a boss! (no literally, I'm the boss of all these flaky guest bloggers and weird staff members)--while he goes and does things like teach people English, play househusband to his "chosen family" (or whatever hippy thing he's calling it today), and tries to make the world a little better than he found it or some shit. He prances around reading and "working on his fiction" while I'm the one who knows that sex sells and talking about groupie threesomes is totally good P.R.

I hate that guy.  But I think I hate him slightly less than I love page views.  So.....


Now that I'm settling into this new semester, I have a better idea of how the update schedule should look, so I'll fix that to reflect the really real changes, and what folks can expect out of my update schedule.  I imagine I'll start writing some kind of more personal life-ish update on Mondays.  Then I'll alternate big articles and "guest bloggers" (that's guest bloggers WITH scare quotes) on Tuesdays. The rest should be pretty similar.

For a year and a half, I've been keeping only snippets of my personal life on this blog (and only when they directly affected my writing life) because I figured 1) who the hell wants to read about me, and 2) my life isn't exactly about writing.  While both those things are still mostly true, I can't deny that 1) there does seem to be some curiosity about my life (Google analytics never lie....right?), and 2) writing has become so central to my life that it bleeds into almost everything and almost everything bleeds into it.

I'm still going to try to tie things back to writing...at least a little.  I feel like I'm being a narcissist if I don't do it at all.   ("Hey everybody.  Come gaze upon my life!")  I'm pretty boring anyway.  If I don't work in some broader implication, you're likely to fall asleep. I'll try not to make it too South Parkian ("I've learned something today...."), but I will fail in that regard.  Horrifically.  Repeatedly. So if it takes me a while before I get the hang of incorporating writerly wisdom into vignettes please bear with me while I find my sea legs.

Also, having kept a Livejournal for about the last fifteen years I have unwittingly discovered something about the human condition.  People don't actually LIKE it when you write about them to the open internet and it's bajillions of readers unless it is in the most complementary terms.  And by "discover" I mean "had my face melted off for doing so enough times that it actually stuck."  You can say "here are ten thousand good things about Jeff and one thing that I find isn't perfect" and you can pretty much guarantee that it'll be about ten seconds before you get an email or comment from Jeff saying, "Dude, what the fuck?  We aren't friends anymore, BRAH!"

Thus, it is very likely that my ongoing efforts to crack the window to my personal life will involve ambiguities, vagaries, and my ongoing brand of magical (and superheroic) realism that protects the people in my life who aren't ready or willing to be blogged about.  My personal goal is that no one will EVER have to look me in the eye and with a sincere voice say: "Chris, I need to ask you not to blog about this."  If that ever happens as a genuine concern (and not a general disclaimer) then I will have failed in telling you about my life without telling you about the people IN my life.  I guess I'm not quite ready to go Anne Lamott "you-should-have-been-nicer!" on their asses.  There are still going to be things that I won't share unless you know me, things I won't share unless your my friend, and things I won't share unless one of us has had their mouth on the other's junk.   Don't ask me for a decoder ring.

If everyone is okay with all that....