answering the unasked question since 1968

In my short-term memory loss, I’ve forgotten how I found the blog He Loves Me Not belonging to Desperate Sarah.

If she’s one of your visitors, please let me know in comments. Lord knows Blogger is the archenemy of the pingback, so simply linking to her here won’t do much good.

Sarah, I stole your list all about me (and my blog). You saved me from the pain of original content thinking-upping. Thanks.

For those of you who know the answers, it will not hurt my feelings if you stay to read them anyway. Then, like, go answer them on your blog. Remember the Great Blog Memes of 2006? Do people still do those?

Ahem:

1. How long have you been blogging?

Officially since April 2006, but I was Weblogging the hell out of planning my eventually canceled wedding starting in July 2005 on weddings.com/somethingorother.

2. What made you start? That damn canceled wedding. What else was I gonna do in my cubicle to fill the void of choosing bridesmaids gowns and figuring out how to insert Jordan and Jon Alex, then 10 and 3, into the ceremony?
3. Who inspired you? I’d heard about personal blogs, but didn’t really know how to start one until one of my co-workers fired his up. It looked like fun.
4. About how many hours a week would you estimate you spend on your blog? Anytime I’m awake, I guess. Don’t judge me.
5. What kind of writing experience do you have? Procrastination, laziness, depression. The usual.
6. Talk about how you come up with blog topics. Where do you get your ideas? The voices in my head get together for coffee around 4:30 am every Monday. They brainstorm, battling back and forth over drinks by mid-afternoon. Somebody usually surrenders a decent idea to the team sometime around Sunday after midnight or around 4:29 am Monday morning.
7. What or who inspires you and your blog? The mighty and violent struggle between unrequited and unconditional love.
8. Where and/or how do you do your brainstorming for your blog? Hey, there, Answer # 6. Good to see you here! Bagel?
9. Do you have any blogging rules or guidelines you follow? Holy shit, no. Rules bad. Guidelines very flexible. I had to ban somebody from an older blog once for personally attacking one of my guest contributors. Q and his friends banned another commenter for personally attacking me. I suppose it’s all on a case-by-case basis.
10. Is there anything you will not blog about? Anytime you can get a better report about it on CNN, you won’t find it here. There was a time during the presidential primaries when latent racial reactions showed up for a second in many of my posts. It wasn’t intentional, and it’s all Barack Obama’s fault.
11. Do you have any sort of a publishing schedule in terms of day of week or topic? Fuck around Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Write something interesting on Thursday, my “heavy traffic” day. Fringe Friday Fellowship on Friday, Wordle Weekend on Saturday, nothing much on Sunday. Truth be told, the Friday and Saturday posts are written on Thursdays, then scheduled. I’m not really around starting Thursday mid-morning.
12. How many drafts of potential blog posts do you have right now? Zero. I don’t draft. I write directly onto WordPress dashboard, proofread incessantly, post or schedule, proofread, let it fly.
13. In what medium do you draft your posts? Answer #12 says pass the bong.
14. How often do you completely scratch or delete drafts or blog post ideas? All the time. It’s more delete without saving since I don’t draft. Some things really are better left unsaid, especially living forever on the Web.
15. If you had to leave your blog in your will to another blogger, who would you choose? I love this question. If I wanted quirkiness and a close personality match, I’d leave it to my husband who would never ever update it. For pure methodism, I’d leave it to Michele. She’s a regular updater and if she’s going on hiatus, she lets people know. But in the real world, I’d hope Motormouth and Tex in the City would co-blog it. MM for the earthy don’t-tell-everybody-that and Tex for the announce it all to the world-liness. It’s a dichotomy that would balance well after I die from reading my Twitter feed on my iPhone while hiking near black bears.
16. Are there other blogs that you feel are similar to yours in content, style, or voice? I read blogs that are quite different from mine because reading me all day would cause epileptic seizures, but I do feel a special connection when reading Average Jane.
17. Has anything surprised you since you started blogging? Two sides of the same coin: I am often surprised by how welcome I feel in one community I may stumble upon, then I am surprised by the cliquishness of other communities. How can you not answer a first-time commenter even if your policy is to never visit the comment box? How do you completely ignore complimentary emails? I feel blessed by the first, stabby because of the second.
18. What are your goals or plans for your blog going forward? I’m not leaving this one like I did the others until it comes to a natural end. No more abrupt stops.
19. Do you make any money from your blog? Dude, 14 bucks since mid-January! And that’s with all of seven readers. Think of the moolah if I had a larger readership? I could buy gas for the whole month, which is actually my goal.
20. What blogging system do you use? Powered by WordPress, hosted on Go Daddy.
21. How did you come up your blog name? I’d let my original sarcasticfringe.com domain lapse, and Go Daddy suggested freefringes.com as a substitute. I liked it and went for it.
22. How many blogs do you have? What was your peak? One. One. I spend too much time on this one as it is.
23. Are you having as much fun as when you started? That’s a trick question. I didn’t know anything about blogging when I first started, so it seemed like I was having more fun than now [ooh, look, a comment!]. These days, I’m more settled into my tiny community, and I love the people surrounding me here. Maybe on the Zoloft, I’d admit to fun. Off the Zoloft, I’d use the word fulfilled.
24. Where do you find other bloggers like you? That’s a hard search these days in the blogging world of SEO, self-marketing and Disney cruises for the A-listers. The bloggers like me are already here. When I go searching for more, I get turned off by the marketing spam.
25. What’s your one wish when it comes to blogging? I don’t really think about blogging so seriously to have any wishes stored up for it. Wait…I’d love to have an entry into the American lexicon like homey don’t play dat or can’t we all just get along or you go girl. Maybe before the black bears eat me and my hiking boots, I can say something catchy.