Month: January 2008

Is Blogging Harder Than Writing A Book?

Will Leitch says so:

Much has been written about the relative lack of sales success for books written by bloggers, as if bloggers were an ethnic group, or some sort of easily charted genre. Every blogger is different from the others; I can’t think of a single shared characteristic among bloggers, save for lack of a tan. The one thing we do do, however, is write. A lot. I’ve worked for newspapers, magazines, television stations, doctor’s offices, you name it, and no job requires more daily effort than being a professional blogger. If people have a slow day at the office and do a little less work than usual, hardly anyone notices. If I have a slow day, every commenter on my site lets me know immediately.

I’d say they’re just very different genres and each can be hard in their own way. I have to say that producing a book – I have four under my belt if you count my dissertation – is a draining, soul-sapping catharsis. Part of the strain is working for a long time and not knowing if any of it will be worth it. Blogging is almost the polar opposite: almost everything you write is read and used by someone. On a simple hour-by-hour basis, blogging is harder work. But the thinking required for a book – the slow sifting and weighing of competing ideas, themes, structure, arguments – is a deeper, more painful process.

Most of my books have clocked in at around 80,000 words. I write around half a million words a year on this blog. On a pain-per-word basis, books are harder. But at least there is a point at which they are over, at least in the writing. A blog never stops. The deadline is always with you. Yes, even on a Sunday evening.

(Hat Tip: Frank Wilson.)

Face Of The Day

Kikuyurobertoschmidtafpgetty

A Kikuyu boy looks from behind a church bench in a monastery that hundreds of displaced are using as a camp high in the mountains some 10 km from the small central Kenyan town of Kepkelion 27 January 2008. Some 140 Kikuyu families sought refuge from ethnic post-election violence at the monastery and have had members of the Kalenji tribe attack them in the periphery of the monastery on several occasions. The men and women of the group sleep inside the church at night. More than 850 people have been killed, according to an AFP tally of police and hospital figures, since the disputed December 27 election touched off a wave of deadly rioting and ethnic killings. Some 260,000 people across the country have been forced to flee their homes. By Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty.

“Well, He’s Lying”

Romney blurts out the truth. For a change. But it remains true that he was never as enthusiastic/delusional a supporter of the surge as McCain. As Rich Lowry commented many moons ago:

[For Mitt Romney] to speak for 50 minutes or so and not to talk about the Iraq war before a conservative audience at a crucial moment in that war is bizarre and just wrong and almost offensive in my view. This doesn’t seem like an oversight. He went out of his way to check off every conservative box—except the one that is politically risky at the moment.

McCain’s biggest liability in the fall is his total embrace of a permanent Iraq occupation. Romney, as usual, gave himself some lee-way.