about five years ago (oh, my god, i am getting so old), my friend jenny had a political blog. back then, blogs were popular among the techno-savvy only. blogger was not yet around to provide those of us with the computer skills of pre-historic humans an opportunity to share our lives via the internet. hers was the only blog i read, and when she stopped posting, i missed it, but i always knew (because we speak on a near daily basis) that her blog would be back some day. hope remained alive. i stopped reading blogs then because, well, hers was the only one i read.
fast-forward five years. thanks to jason's suggestion that i start keeping a blog myself, and the blogs of friends including jason and margarita, and the massive depth and breadth of the blogging community as a whole, i am a blog addict. i check my regularly read blogs almost as often as i check my email. they have become as much a part of my day as brushing my teeth or deciding whether or not i want to watch a horrible season one episode of star trek: tng on spike tv. and several days ago, one of them died.
miss snark, the very BEST blogging voice out there on writing and publishing, retired. she said she'd answered all the questions she could, and she announced that she would no longer be making new posts, though thankfully, she will maintain her website so that we can partake of her famous 'snarkives.' after i confirmed that the date was not, in fact, april first and the announcement was not, in fact, a joke, i was just struck by this incredible wave of sadness, much more profound than any i've ever felt over the death of a celebrity, or even a distant relative that i only knew from the way they pinched my fat cheeks at bi-annual family get-togethers. miss snark was gone. i wasn't ever going to get to 'talk' to her again, 'hear' her witty voice, or 'witness' her amazing knowledge and seemingly endless patience for naive and inexperienced and generally stupid writers like me (which isn't really the case since she's leaving us her archives, but that was the overly-dramatic thought i had in the moments after reading about her retirement). i was so, so, so sad.
and then i was so, so, so surprised because i've never stopped to contemplate how much my daily blogs mean to me. the regulars -- those bloggers who are committed to posting at least three times per week -- are a source of stability, of constancy. they are reliable, and that is frankly unique. miss snark was great, not just because she is brilliant, but for a whole host of other, deeper reasons: she cared enough about her readers to read and reply to their emails, to put on contests for them so they could improve their hooks or queries, to post important information about what was going on in the world of publishing. and she did so with humor and grace and not a little snarkiness, like a beloved grandparent (in case miss snark somehow ever stumbles upon this post, i should note here that i have no idea how old miss snark is, so the grandparent reference has nothing to do with supposed age) lovingly teaching their grandchild some skill that modern sensibilities have overlooked and undervalued. bloggers like miss snark are the reason that some people believe, in contrast to technophobes who preach against the impersonal 'unreality' of the internet, that the relationships developed in the online world are real and important. with the death of miss snark's blog, i realized just how real and important they are to me.
so here's a shout out to all my regulars. you know who you are. thanks for stayin' alive.
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2 comments:
My goal is to one day be the equivalent of your Miss Snark... but that will not happen anytime in the forseeable future... so you'll have to be satisified with once-every-couple-of-weeks posts that are low on content but high on FUN!
If only we could all post as often as Miss Snark. I wonder when she had time for her regular job??
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