Do You Wanna Blog?

A friend and I were talking the other day and she said, “I’ve been thinking…maybe I’ll start writing a blog,” to which I promptly responded, ”Yes, you should!”

Should YOU write a blog? Blogging is a great creative outlet and while I’m no authority --the truth is that I currently have no fewer than FOUR blogs lurking out there in cyberspace. I don’t keep them all current, though I’d love to. In fact, I miss writing in them.

I decided to compile a checklist to help you decide if blogging is for you. It is solely based on my opinions. That is the number one beauty of writing your own blog: you control the content so it’s whatever YOU think. Is blogging right for you? It might be!

YOU MIGHT WANT TO START A BLOG IF:

1.   You want a website. It’s probably the cheapest, easiest way to do it. Two services, Blogger and Wordpress, offer most of this to you for free.  

2.   You ENJOY writing. You don’t have to write much. There a tons of blogs out there that are mostly pictures. But the reality is, you have to put content out there on a regular basis for readers/viewers, and this most often requires a bit of writing. Some people LOVE to write. Others hate it and find it a real pain. This is what I’m talking about.

3.   You feel comfortable putting yourself out there. This goes along with # 3. But guess what – you don’t even have to put yourself out there! You can limit who sees your blog. So, for example, only your family might see it. I have a blog like that, where I post family pictures, etc.  

4.   You want to chronicle an important life milestone, or share a skill or passion with others. Maybe you do book reviews, or write about cooking, or sports. A lot of people blog about the birth of a child, or just a particular holiday, etc. .. AND:

5.   You need to find an efficient way to share your words, pictures or other content with a group of people. This is the reason I started my “family” blog. It’s really hard to send a lot of pictures through email.  A lot of them are too big and they take forever to load on some people’s computers. I liked having a website, basically, where my family could go and read and look.

6.   You have some computer skills. Okay, you don’t have to be a programmer or software designer. The free blog sites out there are amazingly easy. But you do need to possess basic computer skills, such as cutting & pasting, formatting fonts (changing the style or size, for example), uploading pictures or other files.



Blogging in Nashville


So, do you think you want to do it? Stay tuned. I’ll have more to say in my next BLOG, when I give some of the reasons you might NOT want to blog.



This picture has nothing to do with blogging, but Toonie asked to be included because he sometimes tries to blog.



Paul Simon and the Rest of Us

Is Paul Simon an asshole? Is Paul Simon a thief who stole from Los Lobos (among others)? Are we all thieves and potentially assholes? A sequence of events has caused me to ponder these questions.  

Let me state for the record that I'm a Paul Simon fan!  And so I was thrilled to see the recent Paul Simon interview in American Songwriter Magazine.  http://www.americansongwriter.com/2011/09/paul-simon-on-songwriting-i-know-what-i-know.  In it, he discussed his process for writing, and it resonated deeply with me.   

As I casually surfed the net for more info on my beloved PS, I stumbled upon an interview in which Steve Berlin, of Los Lobos, claimed that Paul Simon had stolen from them on his Graceland album, AND that he was a huge asshole about it.  http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/04/rhymin-simon-no.html.     

I can’t go around worrying about whether Paul Simon is or is not an asshole.  But if he’s a thief, it saddens me.  In the case of Los Lobos’ contribution – Berlin claims they did not receive a co-write credit for a song they brought to the Graceland project (no lyrics). Everyone would agree that Paul Simon – among others - borrows inspiration from many sources.  At what point is it considered stealing?  Do we all "steal" material?     

Nobody is a creative island, and nobody creates in a vacuum. INFLUENCE by other artists is inevitable and I would say necessary in order to grow.  If I hear a chord progression or a little riff that speaks to me, I might try to incorporate it into a song, but in a way that makes it unrecognizable as anything but mine. And many times we hear the story behind a successful song that goes something like this: the songwriter hears a phrase or expression in conversation that sticks in his brain. He takes it and forms an amazing song from it. That’s not stealing – that’s inspiration driving the creative process.      

That being said, I do take care to try to verify that the lyrics and accompanying melodies I write are my own.  And sometimes that can be tricky, what with all the flotsam and jetsam of information floating around in my brain. How do you know? You do what you can do, I suppose.     

Back to the asshole question:  it could get complicated. I mean, which comes first – the asshole or the crime?