Canis lupus hominis

As I have noted before, I have been writing this blog for nearly two years. It will be two years old in July 8th. My earliest scribblings were a bit didactic, full of information and not enough attention paid to style. I’m still working on it, but I think that my writing is a good balance of information, humor, and some absolute piffle thrown in. I also try to make the reader feel comfortable enough reading to leave a comment or two.

I read a lot of nature and pet blogs. Some of them are good at helping the reader understand. Others, not so much. Some of them are all about the blogger and that blogger’s ideas. It’s not about the readers. It’s not about trying to reach out to the world at large. It’s just about spouting opinions and analysis.

And if you do that, you will either bore people or tick them off. Of course, even ticked off people read your blog. People like to be outraged.

But if you actually want to do this right, you have to allow other people in. Maybe it’s because I’m a liberal, and there was a recent study that showed that blogs owned by liberals were much more open than those owned by conservatives.

However, it may come from something else. I have to have feedback.  I am forever trying to improve my writing style on goals I have outlined in the previous paragraph. If you don’t understand something, I’ve done something wrong. If you don’t feel like you can leave a comment, I’ve also failed.

Now, I do put myself in this blog quite a bit. I often leave comments to respond to the views of others, which means risking certain perils. One of these is that I can be a bit less edited  in the comments. Because comments don’t give me much opportunity to prepare my language, I know fully well that I’m going to have typos, and I’m going to say something wrong.

However, running a blog in this fashion does mean I get to “know” my readers, and that in itself is something interesting. I get tips in e-mails all the time, which I store away until I can use them in a blog post.  In my e-mail, I also get people who gripe, which I expected, and I also get people who gush, which I did not expect at all. The people who tend toward the latter category are now more prevalent in my inbox– whatever that means.

A blog can teach you many things. However, it is not merely the reader who gets informed. I learn more and more every day. I don’t think I could ever stop doing this. It’s a fascinating experience, especially when the blog starts to get thousands of page views a day.

I thank you for reading, even if you’re just here to be outraged.

P.S. I did go a little crazy last night. I have reasons for it beyond the nagging I got from a Millan-defending griper. It was a very bad time to start me on one of these.  I wasn’t exactly angry. I was full of beans, and when I’m full of beans, I get silly. The anger in the posts was but an affectation.

And I apologize for deleting the posts. There were good comments, but I don’t need those posts anymore.

And I know none of that makes sense.

It’s not supposed to.

Just give me the license to be silly on my own blog, and things will be fine. I working on a satirical post, but unfortunately,it has fallen flat. I need to retool it some more.

Yes. That whole last part of this blog post is a failure.