Irrelevant Cheetah

In some roundabout way, I got directed to this post on Josephine Damian’s blog. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, it begins to tell about her workshop experience with Donald Maas, a famous agent, and her question to him about whether author-blogging is a good thing, and if it helps or hinders their (future?) careers.

His answer: “…the biggest thing I’m afraid of with these blogs is that it scratches the itch.”

Ouch!

At first I thought “Oh, crap!” because that’s exactly what I do – I blog to scratch the writing itch, and now here’s an agent saying that it’s not a good thing. I can see where he’s coming from. Blogging can be distracting. Worse yet, it can take time and creativity away from your work-in-progress, whatever that may be. Before you know it, Chapter Four has been unfinished for three months, but you’re clicking ‘refresh’ on your blog every ten minutes to see if there are any more witty comments on your post about how the cat peed on you. I admit it: I’m as guilty of that as the next guy.

The more I think about it, though, the more I think that it may not always be a bad thing to scratch the itch, and my reasoning is thus:

Some of my itches have absolutely no business going anywhere near any of my works-in-progress. I seem to be heading down the road of using this blog as a creative outlet for more than just my writing, and that stuff has to go somewhere.

Cases in point: Bringing sexy back, or A good day. Both of these sprang to mind nearly fully formed, and neither one of them has anything to do with anything I’m currently writing. But they had to get out, and if I hadn’t had this outlet there’s no telling what havoc they could have wreaked in my brain. (I apologize again for any havoc they may have wreaked in yours, now that I let them out.)

It’s interesting that this comes up now, because I am currently furiously working on the last (I hope) re-write of SongMaster’s Realm before I begin submitting queries to agents. I’ve got a fully-finished 93,000 word novel sitting on my hard drive and I haven’t done anything with it in six months. I’ve been blogging, though. Boy howdy, I’ve been blogging, and as you can see, it’s done my writing career a lot of good.

Perhaps blogging is less frightening than the idea of rejection by an agent. It’s more immediate, and nobody cares if they’re ‘hooked’ on page one, or if you’re using too many clichés. I think I need to get off my ass and submit, though. How else will I know if I’ve written something decent?

I think it’s time to quit scratching so much.