...or something.

~from Ami

I get all excited when I read an email on one of my listserves entitled RE: PUFFING A BLOG. If anyone’s blog needs to be puffed, it’s mine and Jill’s. What does this mean? What is WITH this lingo? I follow instructions and find myself puffing and pinging my blog on sites meant for such activity.

I run into my son’s room. “I just hit Blogflux and Ping-O-Matic for pings on my blog!” He stares at me, ever so blankly, but with the sort of endearing patience one would offer a child who’s discovered paste. Zack cares not for marketing, branding, or establishing one’s presence on the internet, because when he blogs after school, he gets 47 comments before dinner. I’m lucky to get two in a week. Zack blogs For Fun. “Can you tell me what I just did?” I ask, wanting to know it’s acceptable to puff and ping in cyberspace. “The ping and the flux and everything…?” Needing assurance from a sixteen year-old. What do I know?

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says, turning back to the computer, where thirteen kids have IM’d him while I’m standing there.

In my day….Oh, my god, I’m not even going to finish that sentence.

(Using The Telephone, circa 1986)

I’m also plogging, much to my utter chagrin. I have little excuse to add anything else to my schedule, and had actually forgotten about my plogging duties, until I signed onto a seldom-used email account and found a nagging reminder from amazon that I was now verified as the actual author of my actual book (great- thanks!) and if I haven’t plogged, I better get to it, sistah!

Plogging is amazon.com's version of blogging, and those of you who bought a copy of Next of Kin from amazon.com should see my plog next time you sign on in the near future. If I’ve done it correctly. If I’ve pinged, puffed, and fluxed everything appropriately. Which, who's to say since Zack won't tell me.

I signed up with amazon.com's author program, unable to resist yet another way to reach the unsuspecting masses. Amazon required me to write a bio, which I cut and pasted from my website. ERROR, the warning read, as I tried again and again to save the biography, PROFANITY IS NOT ACCEPTABLE. Well, hmmm, wasn’t aware my bio was that profane. I read it over and over again. It’s long, yes, but I couldn’t find a swear word or even anything CLOSE. I normally reserve swearing for my Jack Russell Terror, who is now living happily on a horse ranch in Pawhuska, OK, and not for mild-mannered online author biographies. So I started cutting paragraphs, trying to determine where the alleged profanity was hidden. It must have been in the second paragraph, because after I cut that out, everything was peachy. If you compare my website bio to my amazon.com bio, the paragraph about my reading habits is nowhere to be found. Perhaps the very mention of Lord of the Rings or A Connecticut Yankee in King Author’s Court set off the censors. I don’t know. I really don’t know anything.

Southwestern mystery writer Pari Noskin Taichert, who contributes to the Murderati blog asked fellow mystery writers why they blog.

To reach readers in a more personal way, I said, but the biggest reason is just to have FUN writing. Sometimes, writing is a job. But on my blog, it’s fun to write again, whether anyone reads it or not.