I Won Big Prizes from Blogging!

When I started blogging, I was writing for my local community, focused on friends and relatives. And, by a stroke of luck, maybe for a sprinkling of Pinoy readers.    

Myopia.

Now what do you know? Just into my fourth month and I receive one surprise (prize!) after another.

ONE, hits from the big, wide world.

After I learned to operate my stat counter and to analyze its facts and figures, I realized that my guests, aside from Filipinos, are people from faraway lands—China, Poland, New Zealand, Chile, Portugal, American Samoa, United Kingdom, Japan, Africa, Brazil, Italy, Canada, Spain, Australia, US (from over a dozen states), and Saudi Arabia?! I thought they might have been misled surfs or errant hits, but their visit duration lasted minutes and hours?!

TWO, friendship with total strangers.

One of my guests asked via email where she could buy my books for her four kids. I named all the bookstores in the country, including those in Baguio. Little did I know that she is from Vermont, USA. She invited me to visit her blog—an intimate diary of a SAHM (Stay At Home Mom), “white European mix” married to a Chinese. She's now my e-pal.

Other emails from virtual strangers, and acquaintances I have already forgotten, also make my day.

THREE, gifts of grace from other blogs.

As I visit other websites, I meet people who, unselfconsciously, let you in on their lives—what they hate and love; their activities and their thoughts; their tears and fears; and how they learned life lessons. You see parallels with your own life and you start feeling better and finding new options which were not in your original limited list.

FOUR, the joy of “throwing caution to the wind.”

Lest that cliché mislead you, let me explain. I come from a generation where writing is sacred. When I was growing up, we had a writing discipline. Before sending out letters, we first wrote a draft, which was checked for errors then copied to a neat stationery. Since internet was still an idea, we diligently researched in the library and wrote our course works with our own, well-crafted words. We read the classics and loved the printed word.

Reviewing my old jottings, however, I found that there are correction marks on the handwritten ones, and liquid paper on the typewritten ones—even in private I was editing my work!

In advertising, every word we wrote had to be justified, and if possible, backed up by market or copy research.

Then I got published. I wasn’t surprised when my publisher assigned me, as a matter of course, two editors: a major one and a back-up one. And are they precise! They see every misplaced apostrophe, cliché, faulty capitalization, overdrawn paragraphs, mixed metaphor, non-space, misquotes (and the sources of the right ones), copyright infringement; yes, every teensy wrong dot and visible pixel.

That affirmed my writing ethic: Every piece one writes, which would be read by a person other than herself,  needs to be reviewed ruthlessly and rewritten endlessly.

A month before November 23 last year, the day I started blogging, I read a few blogs. They were written as though they were spoken spontaneously, sometimes rambling, sometimes babbling, with utter disregard for rules and substance. I read the comments on these posts and no doubt, their visitors, too, were in cadence with them. I said to myself, Why not take on the same attitude?   

Today, I read and revisit maybe a dozen blogs a day, and but for a few exceptions, they have the same cadence. They are what my 18-year-old student told me, “Blogs are self-expressions, not philosophical treatises.”

“Not literature?” I asked.

“Naaah,” he replied.

"Not pieces of art?"

"Nope. It’s kinda’ like . . . well, you know. Wala lang. (translation: just for the heck of it; or, no reason whatsoever; or, it just is; or, no brain surgery needed.”

I have learned that grammatical lapses, or misplaced figures of speech, or flagrant syntaxes, or dangling participles, or typo errors, or even mile-long paragraphs consisting of ten different thoughts, shouldn’t be causes for bursting blood vessels or recurring nightmares.

Ah, the prizes of blogging. They are big, many—and counting!