#573. Direct Current Friday: A-to-Z Reflections

• Somehow I survived the 2013 Challenge.  I know I survived because I distinctly remember going insane at the end of it.  I lost it.  Thanks for being discreet.  Thanks for stopping by!
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• It was a combination of things, really.  I finished writing a commentary series examining The Annotated Sandman over at Comics Reader about a week before the end of the Challenge, and I think I was more emotionally invested in that than the Challenge.  Twenty issues of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, writing notes about the stories and notes about Leslie Klinger's notes (and managing to muscle past my one regular reader's criticism about this).  I've long been interested in reading Sandman, but have only had sporadic experience with it.  There's still plenty for me to read, but it was interesting to see that I really did get wrapped up in it.  I know Gaiman far better from American Gods and Good Omens, but it's impossible not to know about his Sandman if you know much about comic books.  Like when I finally read Jeff Smith's complete Bone, it's a rite of passage.
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• The end of the Challenge happened to coincide with ones of my many existential crises.  I don't think readers like to read about that sort of thing, which is why I don't tend to write about it.  Unfortunately I was writing on a daily basis.
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• The Boston Marathon explosions hit me pretty hard, too, and I was genuinely upset that it didn't seem to affect pretty much anyone else.  Earlier in the month Roger Ebert died, and people cared about that.  They didn't care about Margaret Thatcher's death, which I guess is either apathy or politics.  But to gloss over the explosions and whatever they might signify was a little much.  Anyone ought to know that the blogosphere itself exploded over the idea of gun rights recently.  I get that the blogosphere tends to be pretty liberal.  Writers in general seem to be pretty liberal.  I'm an atypical middle-of-the-road-leaning-toward-conservative (officially listed as an Independent for American voting purposes) writer.  I'm pretty sure that bugs anyone who thinks about it, even if they don't realize they're thinking about it.  One of the prominent bloggers in my own little circle earned my rare Black Mark of Doom.  I won't visit them again because of their emotional and popular but not very critical opinions (even if they seem critical).  I won't name them here.  But I get that people will or won't visit or comment on a blog if they decide they don't like the opinions being expressed.  I didn't expect that during an event that's all about being as accessible as possible I would come across something that would do the exact opposite.
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• Last year was the first time I participated in the Challenge.  I picked up actual readers, and I found a number of blogs that I still enjoy reading to this day.  Some of them didn't participate this year.  I found that I was disappointed about that.  I tried finding new blogs this year, too, and I'm not completely certain how many I found because I sought them out during the Challenge or because I'd recently found them outside of it.  There were a few.  But the most frustrating thing for me was that one of the things I thought could be improved from the last time that was actually undertaken this time by the hosts was in the sign-up process.  People were encouraged to categorize their themes.  Most of them didn't.  What. the. hell.  I visited the first five hundred blogs on the sign-up after an initial attempt to visit based on the categories, only to see that most people didn't do the categories.  There were nearly two thousand blogs signed up.  That's far too many for any one person (even a ninja clone like Alex Cavanaugh) to visit during a month.  And the subsequent 500 blog survey turned up...Well, maybe a saint can come up with positive things to say and like about all those blogs.  I can't.  Most of them simply didn't interest me.  Yes, there was always a good bet that most of any number that big won't register well.  But when "most" is in the 90% range, there's a problem.  So I didn't try to visit the remaining ones.
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• (Yes, I'm still yammering.)
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• I found that some of the blogs I really enjoyed reading early on I couldn't muster myself to keep the same enthusiasm for later on.  The topic was fascinating, but not fascinating to read for an entire month, day after day.  I'm assuming even my most dedicated readers eventually thought the same about my material.  It only figures, and that's another thing that wore on me.  I never thought my stuff would be trivial.  But that's why most people only talk about things other people might already have a chance to know.  That's how you get comments, anyway.  Most people are only really interested in talking about their own thoughts, or offering basic encouragement.  That's the extent of their reaction.  They don't generally tend to care about reacting to someone else's thoughts more directly.
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• It's very hard to tell the difference between genuine interest and general encouragement.  In something like this, most people are simply trying to visit and write as much as they can.  
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• I'll also come out and say this: the blogging community still bothers me in that it seems to be based on a system of reciprocity.  As in, you follow me I follow you.  You give me a comment I give you a comment.  There's no such concept of altruism.  It just seems as if most people won't bother to invest their time unless they see a benefit to it.  The benefit to me is whether you derive anything personally from an experience (i.e. enjoyment).  The gain is what you take away.
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• Yeah, so I was a hypocritical idiot, because I went in at least half my own part of the Challenge expecting people to care about books I'm in the middle of releasing.  I've since realized that for me, that's no reason to blog.  If a blogger "cares" about my book because they can also get me to share their book, that's advertising.  There are plenty of blogs like that.  I'm not one of them, and I've got plenty of blogs, including a reading blog, and I don't write about the blogging buddy books there because I read plenty of other books, and there are other websites to do that sort of thing (such as this or this).  I want to be as positive as I can about blogger buddy books.  On my reading blog I tend to be critical even of books that have been around for centuries.  Blogger buddy books can't function like that.  The whole idea is to be as positive as possible, because anything else can potentially get you a new enemy.  (Repeat Blogger Buddy Rule No. 1.)  So that's why I don't do that on my blogs.
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• Oh!  Speaking of my reading blog, the linky list that's on the right is for a new reading club.  Visit the Armchair Squid's blog to find out more about the Cephalopod Coffeehouse.  I'll be participating here at Scouring Monk, but anyone interested, can read more about my reading habits at Hub City (or those other links).
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• Of course, that assumes I haven't succeeded in pissing everyone off, alienating myself.  Although I've bitched about blogging before and survived.
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• I've also been watching a lot of TV-on-DVD recently.  I enjoyed Day Watch and Defying Gravity and Flashforward again.  I loved these short-lived shows the first time.  I love them more now.  I watched Firefly (and Serenity) again.  Everyone loves Joss Whedon right now.  Yet I've never quite gotten around to loving him.  Appreciate him, yes.  But he speaks a different language, the way most people would approach, say, Grant Morrison.  Firefly has always seemed to me a little disturbing.  It's a pastiche on the Civil War and clearly sides with the Confederacy.  In one of the special features from the Serenity DVD, he says it's less to do with sympathy for the so-called Lost Cause so much as the classic underdog conceit.  And yet it's such a clear parallel...Anyway, it got me thinking about being a native of a region where there was a regime that was later determined by popular record to be on the wrong side of a conflict (or ideology or whatever).  Whedon is a native of New York, but I would have assumed that he came from a Southern state.  Why then such apparent sympathy with Johnny Reb?  He says there's a great wealth of American literature from this vein.  I'm thinking Jesse James?  Even Star Wars to an extent.  Apparently I would need to study that a little more.  Anyway, I've determined to write some Browncoats fiction to explore this for myself.
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• I also just finished watching Spin City, some of Michael J. Fox's favorite episodes.  This was a great show.