Confessions of a novice blogger.

It has been a long time since I posted anything. OK, it has been ages. What can I say? Life, work, kids, they all come before my blogging.

*Hangs head in shame* I am in charge of a "virtual" book club for my hospital. I say virtual because many of the avid book readers in our group work all kinds of shifts, all different days and times. A hospital is open 24/7. That makes it very hard to have a set schedule without excluding others. So when we set up our group we decided that we would use e-mails, a bulletin board, and newsletters to communicate book news and interests. The newsletters go out once a month, our meeting are more like quarterly. When I cross paths with my fellow co-worker/book club member, I always ask for their input. My questions include "Do you like the newsletter? What books do you want us to bring to our groups attention? Is there anything else you would like us to do?" What they don't hear me ask out loud: "Do you read my newsletters? Do you look at our bulletin board? Am I bothering you? Do you still want to be part of this group?"

I read of how authors become insecure about their writing, and here I am insecure about my leadership in a book club! Perhaps readers are also solitary figures, who until the advent of social networking pretty much kept their love of reading to themselves or in the shared lines of the bookstore or library. Then along came blogging.

The truth is, I am a novice blogger. A book club member wanted to know about book blogging. And I found myself stumbling in my explanation. I told her that blogging was when you talk about "stuff" on the internet where people could read it and respond. That was it. My entire explanation. Then she has to ask me to show her how to do become a blogger. Oh oh. Sigh.

I didn't explain to her that I really know next to nothing. That this blog I started is really just an experiment that I started but never expanded upon. That I have like a total of 12 posts. Do I even have any followers?

I am stubborn. After all, everything you need to know is on the internet to explain it all. I have started this little blog. So it's not as though I know nothing. If other people can learn this, I can too. One step at a time.

Step One: Find my focus.
Done! My focus is I will write about book things.

Step Two: Don't over reach.
So I will commit to writing a blog post once a week. That is doable indeed. As I already write a monthly newsletter, perhaps I can include "stuff" from that to here. Perhaps as part of my blog posts I can chronicle my posts so that it will show step by step what I have learned. Now I just have to figure out how to do that. So how do I do that.

Going now to do my research. See ya next week!