• I have yet to find the right tone of voice to use in writing here. While for the most part I thnk I've been fairly successful at avoiding the folksy overly-colloquial voice, I think I have strayed a bit into an overly formal voice that feels a bit strained to me when I read it back. My assumption is that it's just a matter of time until I settle into a groove that feels right. I hope that's true.



• More commentary, less excerpted material.



• It's harder than I anticipated to write to an audience the size of which probably hovers somewhere around zero.
  
  For a couple of years now, I've been doing what I thought was a very blogging-like thing with a private e-mail group of which I'm a member (about which more later), surfing the web and selecting interesting stuff to post, but the ratio of commentary to quoted material in those messages was usually quite low (unless the material unleashed me in some way) and I was always aware of the collective personality of the 20 - 40 people who were (I assume) reading the message. I feel a little at sea without a definite audience to aim at, inhibited by both the idea that no one could be reading, and by the possibility that people I don't know at all could be reading. Since in real life I also suffer from stage fright, despite having acted in high school, college and summer stock, I recognize the feeling: it's not quite fear of failure, more like fear of looking ridiculous.
  
  The sum total is that blogging turns out to be somewhat different, and somewhat harder, than I imagined.



• Also not quite settled is the balance of material. While I'm primarily focused on the political, I realize that there's no way I can perform up to the standards of the political bloggers I most admire. I just don't have it in me to search out stuff in every little nook and cranny on the Web, which means that I'm bound to end up commenting on the same major stories that everyone else is commenting on, and, most of the time, what I have to say doesn't differ all that much from what they have to say. (In fact, one factor which kept me from starting up this site for quite a while is that I usally agree with about 97% of everything Kevin Drum writes for CalPundit -- or, rather, everything that he writes on subjects about which I have an opinion -- which raised the question of why I should bother, since he was pretty much representing my viewpoint. In the end, my ego finally won out over my sense of trepidation, and I thought it worth a try. The jury remains out, though.)
  
  While I really do want to stay away from the "What I did today" style of blogging, I think I'm going to try to allow my activities and interests and what I'm reading at the moment to trigger what I write about, even if that means that some days I write something, and some days I don't, and that I don't end up commenting on every event of the day, simply because it's "political".
  
  (I'm also operating at something of a disadvantage, since I really can't bear to see or hear George W. Bush, and have no intention of subjecting my sensibilities to him just in order to comments on what he says -- not when I'm also taking blood-pressure medication to control mild hypertension. I'm also full of admiration for those who can monitor the weblogs and websites of the right-wing, as I have absolutely no patience with their brand of patent nonsense, and rely on others to report what they're up to online.)

Bottom line? After a week of blogging, I'd give myself a "C".