Dear restless-mind-with-a-sensitive-heart,
That was an interesting and tempting thread you have started. Thanks for that, at the outset.
Well, here is my story dear bloggers.
My first blog was dead, almost immediately after it was started. Courtesy: I forgot the URL!!. I didnt endeavour to retrieve it.
Regeneration: After a long hiatus, I created another one and named it JUST CHEWING OVER (www.just-chewing-over.blogspot.com), meaning 'thinking about'. Ironically, during the initial days, I found it very difficult to 'think about' ideas for blogging when I originally started my blog in 2006. Shamelessly, I agree, that my first post was a synopsis of a news column about something that related to my career area - about a hedgefund collapse (btw career area is hedgefunds mgmt, not collapsing them!) It was an original piece of idea / thought from me I posted back then.
I quite frequently suffered from writer's block. Adding to the misery is the paucity of time. Therefore ended up in blogging very infrequently. However, in due course, I became a member of mouthshut.com where my movie and book reviews received good responses and feedback from fellow members. A good lot - about 25 members - gave feedback and supported me very well. That was sort of a push which encouraged me to write further. One fine day, I also gave my life's anecdotes (ie auto-biography excerpts!) a shot (with my post A Date with a traffic police (http://just-chewing-over.blogspot.com/2007/04/tryst-with-traffic-police.html) which not only did I post it on my blog, but also made a pdf and forwarded it to my friends. Received decent responses, given my inexperience at writing. For the first time my lazy friends read what I wrote and emailed me their appreciations. That was the point of inflection. I went deeper down into the world of blogging and started reading other veteran bloggers. What an amazing lot of bloggers we have around, far better than those crappy book writers. Learnt a lot from these veteran bloggers, which I still keep reading. Their attitude, creativity and humour - swept me over by feet. I'm not a book reader, hardly ten, to be honest. Till date, I enjoy reading blogs to the point that I print out their web pages to read during my office-home commute and at home sometimes (while succumbing to my wife's furious looks and frowns at me) Nevertheless, I do agree, books are always a better source for improving self.
So far, I have about 30 posts on my blog which I wrote in a span of 4 years. Not a great number, I shamelessly agree. However, I surely expect to increase the frequency in due course.
That's the story dear friends.
Before I conclude, let me request you please dont treat this as a promotional trick; no i didn't cut a fast one here. I request you, when you get a chance, do visit my blog and provide your feedback to my posts - this way I would know which genre of writing suits me better. Let us please network together, read each others' and improve ourselves. This is all I have to say before I sign off.
Enjoy blogging! And a very Happy new year!
Regards,
Victor Guerra
(never wanted to disclose my real name, so I always chose to write with a pseudonym. While wondering what to choose, it struck me to translate my original Indian name into Spanish - the result was Victor Guerra. That's my pseudo I always blog with)
