Interviews and an informal survey

[sartorias]

A rarity, there are two! Both short, and not really about me.

Janni Lee Simner is doing a series on the mid-career writer and that one is my turn. (I think some of us are "mid-career" until they find us dead at our desk.)

When I approached the questions asked in this interview, I was thinking about Judith Tarr's recent post, and about the

Comments

[queenoftheskies]

I've definitely noticed your Sunday blog posts missing. I always looked for them while I was reading LJ on Sunday mornings.

I visit BVC on my own when I hear of new books listed there, but because I'm so busy, I normally visit when any of the daily bloggers post links on their LJ's (or wherever I read them) and I follow the links because I want to read the blog posts.

I like what you said in the first interview about the fun in books and in writing.

[sartorias]

Thanks!

[thistleingrey]

I noticed; I follow the BVC blog via Atom syndication ("RSS"), and my feedreader shows post authors' names. I read only a small subset of the posts, based on that. :) I noticed when Brenda Clough's posts waned, too, and I haven't read any of her long-form work....

At this point my eye is caught more by particular authors than by descriptions of particular books. That is, whether or not it's true, I think I know what I want to read--I suspect that's true of many other readers, for varying reasons. It doesn't mean that the posts are exercises in futility, only that changing things a lot is unlikely to show much gain in click-through traffic. I actually like some of the personal posts; Madeleine Robins's sequence on her childhood house was interesting.

One of the BVC blog's definite strengths is that many people contribute many kinds of post, which means that if one has a bit of patience to skim past the less idiosyncratically appealing posts, there is something for nearly everyone.

[sartorias]

Thank you!

[asakiyume]

Yes, I agree with the point about the wide variety of posts.

[bunn]

I largely read blogs when I can subscribe to them via LJ, which acts as my e-book reader. If I can't do that, I tend to dip in only when I see them linked to on some other media. Is there an LJ feed(s) for the BVC blog?

But I'm not sure I notice *absence* of blog, even by writers I read regularly and really enjoy. I don't tend to think about bloggers in those terms. I fear I only really think about them when they shove themselves in front of me with another blog.

[sartorias]

Yeah, I don't notice absences either, just because there are so many streaming all the time.

Thanks!

[suzanna_o]

I will say that I buy all my e-books via Amazon, but why not use the blog to occasionally highlight BVC offerings? I always enjoy reading recommendations, but I am unlikely to comb through the site catalog.
General feedback: don't assume people don't want to read your (or your friends') books. Focus on the books, not the idea that no one is reading them.

[sartorias]

Thank you!

[clarentine]

I have, in the past, mostly gone over to the BVC blog when linked to a post here on LJ (Judith Tarr's horse posts, for instance). There are so very, very many blogs out there, it's hard to find one that keeps me coming back. I still very much mourn the dissolution of the community that had been LJ several years back; all I had to do was have a journal page, and I could read everything that anyone had said! How wonderfully energizing, without being exhausting! And then whatever happened, happened, and now it's like a ghost town around here.

Which is all to say, I hadn't considered BVC as an antidote to the exhausting attempt to stay up with the SFF diaspora, but perhaps it's now gained enough mass and forward momentum to be a destination in and of itself? At any rate, I've subscribed to that feed mentioned above and we'll see.

[sartorias]

That is a very good point about the sff diaspora--it is now impossible to keep up unless one reads a zillion words a minute, or spends all day at it.

Thanks.