The Value (not the Virtue) of Staying Small

The Republic of T has a wonderful post about blogging, traffic, value, and art. I don't have much to add to it, except that I find myself as a blogger dancing at a very sharp edge between feeling that no post I ever write is really going to make a difference, and getting so much attention that it feels everyone wants a piece of me. The latter can be really tough, given that I have three school-aged children and all the responsibility that goes along with that. (Of course motherhood actually trains one to handle multiple priorities better than anything else ever.)

One thing I hope never happens, is that I feel too pressed for time or, God forbid, "important" to respond to that email from a new blogger who genuinely needs help or asks for advice. Republic of T, by the way, wrote that post for Blogroll Amnesty Day. I love that B.A.D. got some people writing more, and I hate that it caused some small bloggers to focus, even for an instant, on their traffic as compared to others. It's about the WRITING, people. Do that. Do it daily for a year, and the readers will come. And you will be pretty damn good at it by then. Trust.

And one last thing. I've found after a good long while of doing this daily, that writers' block is never ever a problem. The next post is always already in my head when I sit down in the morning. Of course, that also means that I tend to look at everything through "bloggable?" goggles. Like this moment, which happened just this morning:

Middle child did a particularly (and unusually) neat job on a 'printing her letters' assignment for school. I sat down next to her with her gold-starred paper in hand and praised her as mommies do. She looked down at her knees and frowned: "I had help with that." "That's okay, who helped you?" "My twenty imaginary friends. Would you like to meet them?" She pointed to spots in the air and rattled off lovely names with lots of vowels. I knew at last she lived in a lovely safe world where her writing would always be legible.**

Have a lovely day and go make something.

PS. **yeah Robert I know it's more than Six Sentences. Maybe next time, ha.