Let’s get this started

When the firehose of the internet spews out content at an ever-increasing rate, will my little blog ever be noticed? Will anyone care what I write here? Probably not. Here goes, anyway.

Perhaps I should have started this blog years ago. When we first moved to New Zealand from the USA would have been a good time; there was so much to write about then, from little day-to-day details about changes in our living habits to big-picture cultural and political shifts. I did write long missives to friends and family on many of those shifts and quirks of life in Godzone, but I did not, then, consider making any of those ruminations public.

To be honest, I wouldn’t be doing this now, if I didn’t have a book to sell, and in the modern publishing world, an author needs to have an online presence.

Opening myself up to the slings and arrows of the blogosphere is intimidating. I’ve heard horror stories of people blogging or tweeting something they considered innocuous, only to have the public turn on them and ruin their careers, personal lives, etc. And the odds are, no matter what opinion you express—if you express any opinion at all—someone, somewhere, will take offence at it.

Even without the public’s help, people grow and change, and something we wrote a year or two ago may make us cringe now. And for all the seemingly ephemeral nature of so much on the internet, once something is out there, it’s impossible to erase.

Still, others have been blogging for years, and keep blogging. I might as well give it a go, too.

What do I intend to blog about? I will probably be feeling my way for months, at least, but some things are certain: there will be many posts about reading. Expect to hear about books I’ve enjoyed, authors I like, good story-telling, meditations on the act of reading itself, and occasionally, venting a little spleen about the state of the modern fiction world. I’ll throw in an occasional entry about the life of a newcomer to New Zealand, and anything else that strikes a chord.

Good reading, friends.

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