Andrea Harris is retiring from the blog world. Andrea has always been one of those bloggers that I needed to read more than I did. I didn't overlook her because she's not a good blogger (quite the contrary), but because I find myself gravitating towards those that comment my blog, I know personally, or show up on my referral logs (note: if you're a blogger that reads this blog, a good way to get me to read yours is to either comment on mine or use your own page to get to mine). Anyhow, Andrea was a real pro (for this inherently amateur enterprise, anyhow) and consistently one of the best out there. In fact, if I had to list ten blogs that I wish mine were more like, she'd likely be on that list (as would similarly retired Page from LastPage).

Like Kevin, I've considered hanging it up myself on a few occasions and, like Kevin, the feeling passes. Most hiatuses start off with me thinking "maybe I should be pursuing other things..." but when I stop, I have waaaay too many "I should blog on this!" thoughts (I have about three of those for every post I actually write). When I hung up RAW1.0 over on Blogspot time was the biggest issue. At other points it's just been the hassle of arguments I don't want to be in.

I'm not much of a book reader like Kevin is, but I notice my book writing has declined since I've started blogging. There's an interesting trade-off, both reading and writing short snippits compared to larger works. The payoffs are vastly different and it's hard to say which is preferable.

When reading blogs, you get a much wider variety of information (or commentary) and there's a sense of accomplishment in that. For me there is, anyhow. The same goes for writing. If I find something interesting to write about I don't need to find a way to work it into a novel or turn it in to a short story. Novels and short stories are fulfilling things for me to write, but they're also a lot of work and there are a lot of ideas that that are good enough to carry a blog post but not enough to carry a short story or a detour in a novel.

In that sense, blogging has actually helped my novel writing. I noticed that when I go back and edit Something So Perfect or Slaughter Book I, there are some scenes that didn't entirely fit that I can rewrite into something more appropriate. I don't need to put a peculiar experience that happened to me or someone I know. I don't feel as much the need to "represent" certain experiences, which leaves me more room to represent the experiences of the characters in question.

The other, and perhaps bigger tradeoff, is immediate feedback. If I post something people can put their thoughts right there and I can look at it in a new way or my subjective experience is widened by those that choose to leave a comment. While writing novels give me a great sense of fulfillment, few have actually read them (my own fault, in part, as I still owe Callie a copy of At Heaven's Door) and even those that do give me their more general thoughts instead of one of (what I perhaps arrogantly consider) the many thoughtful ideas and issues the novel brings forth.

On the other hand, blogging can feel from a writer's perspective (and I can imagine a reader's too) like "all icing and no cake." When I look back on my accomplishments, my novels rate pretty high and (at least right now) the blog doesn't so much. The coverage here is a mile wide and an inch deep. The ideas are never explored as fully as I would like and the longer I explore something, the less response it seems to generate. In that way I'm a poor fit for blogging since I tend to be a probative thinker and blogging tends itself to more cursory coverage.

Then again, that's one of the reasons that I started blogging to begin with. I want to get certain thoughts out of my head and I want to start writing more and writing less carefully so that I can get more experience actually producing instead of simply creating in my mind.

So RAWbservations isn't going anywhere any time soon. There will be some ebb and flow as I hopefully get back to writing more ambitious projects in the future. But for now it's fun, I enjoy doing it, and I enjoy hearing people's thoughts up against my own.