Who’s the Crazy One?

I have a little story. It’s about a blogger who will remain nameless, but who decided (in roughly this order) 1) to stop taking comments, claiming to be overwhelmed 2) to write posts that, frankly, and IMHO, amounted to so much navel-gazing, and I’m not talking about insightful deep thinking, just word after word that went nowhere … yuck … 3) to write other posts making tedious arguments about arcane issues, blah, blah … who cares? 3) then, wrote a post, in which the blogger rejected the very idea of blogging as outright ridiculous, or even crazy, like walking up to random strangers and sharing your opinions.

Well, that’s a bit ironic coming from a writer who tells stories to random strangers, don’t you think? Because, yeah, the blogger does write stories that are sold on the Internet. Plus if you reject the idea of blogging, why are you blogging about it? Seriously! And isn’t blogging just another form of e-publishing? I always thought so. But this blogger disagrees. Apparently. Not that I can ask. Comments are switched off. Even though, no one would expect one person to respond to a sh*tload of comments, right? Famous people don’t, do they? And this author isn’t a household name, but the author made a point of going around stirring up sh*t on the Internet about publishing for a time. So, he/she got lots of attention from authors and readers and thought the whole world revolved around him/her and was easily bruised, if anyone rubbed him/her the wrong way. Believe me. Because the last time I dared blog about one of the author’s posts, the blogger tore me a new one sent me an angry email. I ended up deleting the post (post-haste — ha ha ha …), in the interests of maintaining amity. And sanity. Mostly my own.

Anyway, who’s to say it’s so crazy to talk to random strangers, anyhow? How do people meet people in real life? They find each other randomly and sense a common bond.

Perhaps the world would be a much better place if random strangers did this more often, huh?

PS: A big shout out to lonelym who’s following this blog now. I was especially moved by this post, because when I published my first novel IDENTITY CRISIS, and worked SO hard to market and promote my book and write the next one, despite my disabilities, my daily mantra was, “Climb the mountain, climb the mountain, climb the mountain …” Really!

PPS: The Internet is a very big place, and I doubt the blogger will read this. However, if you’re reading this, blogger, it’s my opinion. I think it’s a positive message. I’m entitled to it, and I’m sticking with it. I will neither debate you nor delete this post. It’s possible that, if you keep an open mind, you might learn something from it. Maybe. If you don’t like it, you can lump it. And I don’t run from bullies, okay?

UPDATE: While I was tweeting this, I found out that a fellow blogger, Paul Downie, has been quoted in this article. He’s blogged a whole lot about the development issues discussed in the article on Nik Nak’s Old Peculiar.

And, of course, (former) councillor Karen Chilvers blogs about it quite a bit on her blog.

Plus you can find both blogs in the sidebar of this here blog.

Isn’t that awesome?