Life in a fishbowl

Reader-submitted question: Is it weird to have more people you don't know checking out your blog and commenting on your life? I've felt like a few of the comments have been sort of harsh and have made me want to yell, "HEY! You don't know them! It's not like that!"

Yes, it's weird, but it's also nice in an odd way. I'm a writer, but my day job doesn't allow me to do the type of creative writing I do here. This blog is my outlet for personal, funny or weird things. (Forces of Evil: Put your subpoenas away. I'm not saying I want to write this way at work. If I did, it wouldn't be fun anymore.)

It's very cool to know that dozens of people show up every day to see what I've written. I do not have the type of numbers that bloggers brag about, but as I don't sell advertising, I'm not particularly worried about that. I only worry about writing something that's interesting to read and is "me".

When I started to get more readers, I wondered if this blog was too unfocused. It's a bit of this and a bit of that. Grammar tips sit next to Failed Mommy stories, which are next to David Hasselhoff worship videos. As any blog-improvement blog will tell you, this is not good. Nobody wants to read a blog that could be about anything. People want to know that when they come to your site, they are going to get -- well, I dunno, because I don't think I would want to write about the same thing every single day. I thought about splitting the blog into several pieces, and although I eventually banished Uriel, I decided that this is a personal blog. All of those things are part of me.

I also decided that I was going to be honest about things. Let's face it: sometimes I screw up. For example, I haven't been very good at explaining Hoff worship to my readers with Humour Impairment.

There have been a lot of reader-submitted questions and complaints. I love them: keep them coming. And yes, some of them have been more critical than others. With the exception of the Fuckwad Post, that's OK. They are sometimes the high point of my day. They make me stop to think about whether I screwed up even worse than I thought I did. They also remind me that total strangers like my writing enough to come back every day and send me messages about whatever I wrote.

Thanks for your question.