In which I try to determine what I am doing and why

Keeping a blog is new to me, but not to the rest of the world. I have probably spent as much time critically reviewing blogs over the last two weeks as I have writing. Why am I doing it? As I approach my 50th post in two weeks, here are some answers.

1. My understanding of blogs has developed considerably. I used to think about them as the online version of the journal I used to keep next to my bed. Good blogs are not like that, for three reasons: digital media, audience, and narrative. Digital Media: To this forum, I can link to anything on the Internets; that does not just change what I write, but how I think about writing and what I do while I am writing. Audience: No one reads those old black and white comp books of mine, or they shouldn't. In theory, someone is reading this (you are, maybe) and that  impacts composition. Narrative: All good blogs build the frame of a larger story or at least an ethos.
   
2. I am picking up freelance writing and editing jobs lately and having a blog allows me to showcase the range of my writing proficiency easily.
   
3. Stories swirl around in my head like that cotton candy machine at the fair. I just have to put a stick in the opening, and they start coalescing, clumping, and changing. I knew from the beginning that taking one of my favorite lines from my favorite novel (Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing) would be fruitful, but after a couple of days of writing and talking about writing with friends, I realized that I really need a place to capture these stories in my head. There are lots to come: like when I cut myself with a razor while shaving, on purpose, and how I got paid, as a child, to protect a spy in the Smithsonian museum.  Or about the three girls whose footprints always stay in the sandbox together and take on a life of their own.  Or friends I have lost or shucked. Or how I think my life is, by an accident of metaphysics, connected to the life of Ben Folds. Some are true all the way through and some, by only being thought, are even truer.
4. I need to write my dissertation. I will tell you what it's about later; I promise. Have you ever read any Lyotard? My dissertation might become the metanarrative of the blog. In that case, let's hope postmodernism never happened, because, according to Lyotard, metanarratives go away. If there's a "totalizing metanarrative" I want to keep, it's completing my Ph.D. Maybe writing every day, even informally, will help the formal stuff along. See my first post about completing my diss. Update: no writing since then.
5. Whether it's a good one or not, the details of my life make up an unusual story. My interests and experiences connect me to other groups of people (music and movie fans, parents, academics, the religiously curious, urbanites, naturalists), but no big dotted-line surrounds them all. Some of my experiences might be helpful or entertaining to an eclectic variety.
6. I learned how Google enables me to take a picture with my cell phone, textualize it, and immediately post it to the blog without sitting down at a computer. I adore this feature and use it frequently. My photoblog entries are like eyeball postcards.

Maybe that's it. If you are reading, at least now you know what I am trying to do. Compelling blogs are like comic books . . . serialized with good art and cliffhangers. However, that does not make me a hero. I'm not an innocent bystander, either.