k8mo and papersky

Markets might not be conversations, but weblogs certainly are.

Kate (k8mo), a femme en route, blogs Writing for the Living Web as a benchmark of her new blog. I’d said

If you don’t write for a few days, you are unfaithful to the readers who come to visit.

Looking back, I think I was harsh. But this was 2002, and we didn’t have RSS readers and aggregators. Lots of us still had dialup. Today, I think it’s OK to have an open relationship with your readers, to say, “I’m going to update once a day, or once a week, or every now and then.” Keeping your little promises remains a good thing. (Lately, I've been a political news junky and Andrew Sullivan has recaptured my attention by posting intelligently and copiously).

K8mo responds,

I should probably find readers before I worry about being faithful to them. Or does it work the other way around?

But of course she already has readers. There you go.

Meanwhile, I read a humdinger of a new novel — Jo Walton’s Half A Crown — and naturally I told you about it. It turns out that Jo Walton is one of you. Who knew? I wish I’d said more. I wish I’d gushed a little. (This happens all the time; I’ll write a note about someone’s work, and >poof< there they are, like Marshall McLuhan in Manhattan. I call this The Lesson Of The Small School: at Swarthmore, everyone learned quickly that you don’t say catty things about other students lightly, because they’re probably sitting right behind you in the dining hall.) Some days, the blogosphere is small.