By Popular (??) Demand

Every genre has its conventions.  Poems have a ton of white space around them, and the book of poems have to be small enough to fit in a shirt pocket and be beat-up enough to make its owner look serious and troubled.  Essays have theses and evidence and careful chains of argument.  Twitter has 140 characters, short enough to make even ___ sound clever (fill in your favorite ex-governor reality-show host pageant queen here...).

The blog has immediacy, a conversational style, the ability to include hyperlinks, the reverse chronological hierarchy.  But we've been encouraged to try to make the blog into something more permanent, something like... a book.

I have a reverence for those two words.  A book.  I hear the chorus of angels when I think of it.  Even though I've written two books so far and am at work on a third, they still seem way over my head.  I feel a deep sense of hubris even imagining that we might write... a book.

But I've just spent a couple of hours pulling all of our posts out, in forward chronological order, and putting them into a word processing file.  As of the most recent prior post of Wednesday 8/3, the cumulative blog entries total 58,879 words.  A Harlequin romance novel is expected to be 50,000 to 55,000 words, so we've already got that!  (He gave her a smoldering look, a look that revealed his powerful desires.  Her own longing coursed unbidden through her veins like an electrical surge.  They reached out at the same instant, their passions uniting into a single unspoken lunge for the television remote.)

And I can already see some genre conventions that are going to get in our way.  The closest style I can think of to the blog, and one that I dearly love, is the personal essay.  Jon Carroll, a daily columnist of the San Francisco Chronicle, is for me the master of that genre, a writer I've studied carefully.  But the blog is not the same as the newspaper column.  The newspaper column has no hyperlinks, for one thing, nor cribbed images from various websites.  It tends to be a similar length in each iteration, since it has a fixed area of newsprint real estate to occupy each day.  A book can be made of a column's "greatest hits," but our blog has two writers with significantly different voices.

I think the blog really wants to be a blog, with its unique strengths.  But there's so much web noise that an individual blog vanishes into the background.   So let's conduct an experiment, and see if we can translate from one genre into another...

One thing I will say is that I haven't written very much in the past couple of years.   But the regular demands of this year's blog have gotten me back into the writing habit, such that I've put together 40 pages of an entirely new manuscript over the past eight days.  The muscle is getting stronger again...