IRRESISTIBLE TARGETS: THE 300TH POST

As it happens, I have been posting to this blog for exactly two years today, and as advertised, this is post number 300. The mini-milestone, and a sagacious nudge from Carol Nahra, has led me to think a little about what point the blog serves, and what I might do with it.

When I was a kid, I used to write for fanzines. It was fun, but it was a hobby, not a living. When I started working in media, and time was limited, I still wrote the occasional piece for magazines, but continued to write other reviews in my notebooks, for my own critical practice, to clarify in my own mind how I felt about things and perhaps leave conclusions for myself to draw later on. I wrote poetry, which I could do in bits and pieces, but although much of it was published in quality journals, little of it generated income. In those days, working for UPI or ABC or MLB, that wasn't a problem.

Dr Johnson said the man who writes for anything but money is a fool, and for the most part he was right. Obviously, some of the posts on IT have linked to, and commented on, published work that has been commissioned from me, or that I have sold. But just as obviously, many of the essays and reviews I've posted here are things that, a few years ago, I would have expected to have sold--and I tell myself that as my writing ability doesn't seem to have declined precipitously, changes in what we now call euphemistically 'market forces' are to blame.

I have reached a few people via this blog, and received some excellent feedback, which is the part of the writing game Dr Johnson (probably with tongue in cheek) overlooked. And I'd be happy to match the content here against a great deal of material in print or on the web (forgive the immodesty). Originally, I began this blog (actually, I started with a different, sports-oriented blog, And Over Here, and added a third, Untitled Perspectives, specifically about art, but I've left the first dormant and the other almost so) as a dry run for a website, intending it to be primarily crime-oriented. Now I'm looking at various ways to roll IT into a website, something which might act as a focus for marketing myself, as they say. If there's a problem, it's one I've encountered ever since high school, the dilemma of having too wide a spectrum of interests, and not having a specific enough focus for the market to latch on to. That's why a website, directing readers to various specific areas of interest, might work better than what I have been doing, which has been expanding the brief of IT to include whatever interests me.

In the meantime, I'll continue doing what I have been doing here, sharing work that's published elsewhere and work that I just want to share...and thanks for reading...