We(e) little fish

There was a session at BlogHer ’10 on Saturday that I am kicking myself for not going to.  It was called “Little Fish in a Big Pond – Understanding and Loving Your Small Blog.”  I wound up not going partly because of time mismanagement (again. That plagued me all weekend.  Not like I have clock on my cell phone or anything), and partly because I felt  I didn’t need help understanding or loving my small blog. 

But now after reading this post about the session I’m really wishing I attended, and not only because one of the people running it was Celeste, whose blog I read and comment on and who comments here once in a while.  Found her blog through NaBloPoMo a couple years back, met her in person for the first time at the People’s Party on Thursday night. 

Luckily BlogHer has transcripts of the sessions, and after a quick search I found the one for “Little Fish…”.  I started skimming through it and berated myself for not keeping better track of time, and for deciding not to show up late to the session even though lateness appears to have been totally acceptable.  There was a lot of stuff in here that I guess I needed to hear.  I’m having a lot of “me too” reactions for things like:

• Why I don’t have a counter. Numbers don’t interest me. If I go by the people who’ve commented on a regular basis, I think I have an audience of about ten, give or take.  And I’m happy with that.  If I somehow managed to attract a readership as large as Maggie Mason’s or Jenny Lawson’s or Eden Kennedy’s, I think I’d be paralyzed by stage fright.
• Why I don’t want to “monetize” this.  Turning this into a paying gig would suck all the joy out of it.  Sponsors would have expectations.  The only reason I’d ever contemplate allowing advertisements is if the site that serves my blog started to charge me for the space I use.  Even then I might not.  There are worse things to spend my money on.
• Why I’m ambivalent about the whole “giveaway” thing.  I occasionally toy with the idea of giveaways, but not to generate traffic.  I just wanna be able to give my friends free stuff.  I realize there’s probably a trade-off, there.  One can’t give away things like KitchenAid appliances or Nooks or whatever else people hand out without there being some sort of business arrangement in the background.  It would depend upon the arrangement, I guess.
• Who I write for.  I write for me.  If other people like it, great!  So far no one’s left me a comment that reads, “You suck!” (oop!  Tempting fate there) so I assume I’m entertaining.  But really?  I’m happy just talking to myself.  Sometimes I write posts just to jot down things I need to remember—like the one on fixing my faucet.  When I finally need to do that again, I’ll find the post that says I need key grease and which direction the cartridge has to go, ‘cause I’m sure I’ll forget by then.

Well, now I’m going to go back and read the transcript in-depth.  I guess things I need to add to the “do” and “don’t” list for next year’s conference are: “Do keep track of time. Don’t worry about walking into a session late.”

Attend a BlogHer Conference. Check.

I came, I saw, I wanna go again next year.

Things I’m going to do next time:

• Make and bring business cards. Everyone had them. I wound up using my phone to email myself a list of people’s Twitter handles and/or blog names.
• Wear more comfortable shoes to the dress-up events. The ones I bought were killing me. While walking back to the hotel from happies at the Volstead (a few blocks away) I was tempted to kick them off and walk stocking-foot down the sidewalks of Manhattan.
• Take more pictures. I took some with my phone, but I could have (should have) taken more.

Things I’m not going to do next time:

• Be so shy. Oy. I could write a book on this one bullet point alone. I need to remember that everyone is there for similar reasons—to get away from the keyboard, get out from behind the screen, to meet fellow bloggers face-to-face. We all want to talk to each other.
• Leave my camera in the hotel room. It does me absolutely no good when it’s sitting in its case. Though I did get some good shots from the window of room, like the one below. I don’t think I could handle a terrace 20-30 stories above street level, could you? I think I’d be clinging to the walls.

• Leave the badge on the kitchen table! Granted, they did have a kiosk called “Reprints” just for people like me. And I did meet nice people in the line. We had 45 minutes or so to get to know each other. Still. They went to the trouble to print the thing ahead of time so we wouldn’t have a 45-minute wait in line.
• Bring something to do during "down time." I brought an embroidery project I started last month. Didn't touch it once, except to move it out of the way to get at other stuff in my suitcase. Down time? That's when you sleep.
  

The sessions were great. I’ve already started putting into practice some of the things I learned – like that picture above. The original picture was a little cock-eyed, because the building in question was down the street and the terraces were a few floors below me. Here, let me show you:

Unsettling, isn’t it? Like all the furniture’s about to tumble over the edge of the railings and into the street below. And everything looks kind of faded, too. Not quite the way I remember it. I know how to fix the color, but I thought I was stuck with that tilt. Until someone mentioned Windows Live at one of the Geek Lab sessions on photography, that is. Then they demonstrated it. It does cool stuff. One of its features? It straightens pictures. I clicked one button and went from the picture immediately above to one that had the building straight up and down!

Better still? I don’t even have to download this. It’s been hanging out on my laptop for over a year, waiting to be noticed.

I’m going to introduce an Ideas Jar in my house--an idea from another one of the sessions. I will put words and phrases into it—cut-outs from magazines, quotations from books I’ve read, stray thoughts I have that I manage to write down before they leave, things like that—and when I get stuck for material I’m going to take something from the jar and work with it. I may grab the camera and work it out that way. I may write. Dunno.

I also had an idea for a joint blog I’d like to do with my sister. I don’t know if it’ll pan out. More on that later when (if) it develops.

I met lots of great people. You might notice some new blogs in the blogroll to the right of this post. Arts and Dafts is an art blog by Ry, an artist from Brooklyn. She takes great photographs, among other things. And then there’s Feast After Famine, by Dana in Washington D.C. She used to be a journalist, struggled with infertility for a while and beat it into submission. She has four children now. And then there’s Amiee of mamieknits. She lives in Los Angeles, is a knitter, a mother of twins, and an absolute maniac on the dance floor—I’ve seen that last part with my own eyes. She reminds me an awful lot of one of my best friends from high school (who is now an Air Force wife living in New Jersey. Are you out there, lurking?).

I met these three at a BlogHer meet-up at the Volstead. I’ll write about that tomorrow, because it’s quarter after ten now and I really should go to bed.

In an unrelated note, I put eggs on to boil before I started this post and forgot about them until I heard something go “click” in the next room about 20 minutes ago. All the water had boiled away. I’m lucky I didn’t set the house on fire. Can you burn hard-boiled eggs? I guess I’ll find out when I can touch them without losing my fingerprints.