Screen saver ... the leap from blog
to blook has never been easier.
Photograph: David Sillitoe The blog is not a new thing. For years, a host of angsty teenagers, procrastinating students and bored office workers have been chronicling their daily lives and publishing them on the world wide web for all to see and judge, writes Claire Hack.
They're free, they're readily available and they're everywhere. One would assume, then, that these pages weren't meant for the world of great literature. But various publishers disagree. With a growing trend for blogs-turned-books, or "blooks" as they are now known, it seems blogging could kick-start your writing career. There's even a prize for it (the "Blooker") and if you've got a blog and you can get it published, you're in with a chance of winning.
But the ones that get published are presumably a far cry from the traditional adolescent fare. They probably don't refer to things the authors dislike as "teh sux0rz" and in all likelihood, they are heavily edited before they hit the shelves of the local Waterstone's.
I wonder, however, whether this doesn't defeat the purpose of keeping a blog. Surely the idea is that these online diaries grow and unfold, changing as the writer changes, theoretically for a lifetime? They're unguarded and unedited, sometimes self-indulgent and often brutally honest. The self-consciousness induced by the prospect of being published seems rather to contradict the whole ethos of the blog - laying oneself bare for the whole world to see and devil take the hindmost.
That, at least, has always been the philosophy I've applied to my own blogging. And as compared to say Julie Powell, who won the Blooker for non-fiction and confessed that a week before she started, she didn't even know what a blog was, I consider myself somewhat of a veteran. I signed up to Livejournal way back in 2002, in the days when you needed a special code in order to join and began my life in the blogosphere as one of those angsty teenagers. A couple of years later, I'd signed up to Blurty, at first (rather embarrassingly) to publish online quiz results and later as a place to put my growing backlog of poetry.
Who is the true blogger, therefore? And where does the line fall between blog and blook? Perhaps in future we can expect to see an amalgamation of the two - "Collected Blogs", rather than "Collected Diaries". Samuel Pepys, make way for belladonnatook.
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