Christopher Moore's Blog

Blog quality.

Yesterday I Googled around a little, looking at other author blogs. I wanted to get a feeling for how things are done. I mean, it was my publisher who suggested that I start a blog, and while it seems to make sort of sense when I’m on tour, it also seemed like a huge waste of people’s time, including mine.

So I found this list of author blogs . http://www.internetwritingjournal.com/authorblogs/

Now, the first thing I noticed, other than my blog wasn’t on the list of best author blogs, is that all these authors pepper their blogs with links, and they always have their hypertext in row, with a neat, one word highlight that rolls over to a link. I don’t know how to do that, so my links are always raggedy and have "htttp" and colons hanging out and stuff. I blame Ken, our talented web guy, because he has never made me learn how to do that sort of thing because whenever I need to do something hard he does it for me. It’s like I’ve always worn velcro sneakers, and suddenly, one day, I’m confronted with tying my own shoes. I can fasten the velcro bit at the top, but the laces just drag out behind me catching dirt and old chewing gum and stuff. I blame Ken for my velcro shoes.

(I give up. I just wrote a 500 word rant about the clunkiness of this interface, which I’ve erased because I couldnt’ make it do bold type.)

Instead, here:

Read Meg Cabot and Jennifer Weiner’s Blogs. They are both smart, funny, and don’t completely lose their mind over this stupid interface. The Dilbert Blog is usually entertaining, too. David Brin’s blog is great if you were starting to feel kind of smart and wanted to be knocked off your high horse.

If you check out the other blogs, and see entries like, "didn’t work out today, was feeling poopy" or "my agent called today about the film rights to Noobs in Neverland, looks like Warner is stepping up to the plate" then you’ll really understand why I don’t do blog entries every day. My own life is so mind-numbingly boring that writing about it for others to see makes me want to open my veins and let the self-importance flow out all over the floor.

That and this lame, cumbersome, stupid interface. It’s like using Wordstar in 1983. You might as well have hired hamsters carrying movable type letters across the room to a Gutenberg printing press.