We Are Not Alone

That sentence - we are not alone - is from some sci-fi movie, but I can’t remember which one. It has a rather ominous tone to it. I thought I’d use it as the title of the blog, but not in an ominous way.

Bloggers tend to post their thoughts or reviews or beliefs and wonder if anyone stops by. When comments start showing up, we think, wow, someone read what I wrote and added their thoughts to it. It begins to feel like an intimate conversation between yourself and the five or twenty people who show up on any given day.

I don’t think it matters whether you’re blogging for fun, or to promote your book or yourself, or to try to focus your thoughts and fears, you still are amazed or gladdened or wowed by those who comment. I am. I seem to have a core group who comment every day, and I am amazed by that. I now have close to 200 followers and that boggles my mind. Some days I check the blog and think, good gracious, 30 people have commented.

And still, it feels like a one-on-one conversation between myself and the commenters. I, and possibly others who blog, tend to forget that for every person who comments, there could be five or twenty who read and don’t comment.

What brought this into focus was something that happened this past weekend at the Texas Book Festival. Leading up to the Festival, I introduced, here on the blog, some of the authors and books who would be appearing at the Austin Museum of Art, the venue that I chair. They weren’t really reviews, but more of an enticement (I hoped) to get some of you to come hear the photographers and artists who were speaking.

In-between the speakers, we (myself and volunteers) go into re-set mode. We’re cleaning the room, straightening the chairs, whipping away opened water bottles and name plates from the speaker tables and putting out new stuff for the next speakers, etc. At one point, in the midst of doing all this, a photographer who had already finished his talk came up to me and thanked me for writing about his book on Straight From Hel.

Now, I know that people visit the blog and don’t leave a footprint that they’ve been there, but I was flabbergasted that he’d read the post. My guess is he or his publicist has a Google alert on his name or book title. Still, it totally surprised me.

It also reminded me that as bloggers, we are not alone.