Of course, he’d have had to learn to type first but that would’ve been a minor inconvenience. 😀
OTOH, one of my fondest memories of my father was of him busily clipping articles out of the newspaper or magazines on all kinds of topics and pasting or taping them into a steno-pad that he kept ever handy. He would always jot down when and where he got the clippings around the edges of the pages, which would’ve been great if anyone else could’ve read his writing. So, we’ll just give him an “A” for effort on that one and move along with the story. At any point, he usually had several of those pads stuffed into his desk, clock full of clippings. He’d use them when he wanted to write letters to the editor on various topics about whatever he felt passionately about or when he wanted to write to his representatives at any level of government on whatever issue was on his mind at the moment. Or sometimes it was simply because he got a kick out of the quote he was clipping. You really never knew where he was going to end up going with what he had on hand.
Whatever the reason or topic, he was always collecting quotes and clippings.
Recently I’ve noticed a spat of posts around the romance blogosphere about why people blog. There was one over on Racy Romance Reviews a while back, but it was by far not the only one I’ve noticed in recent weeks. There have been many on various sites, too many to try to link to, and they all seem to be asking the same questions that always get asked about blogging.
Is it about personal journals? About reviewing the books? About community? About promoting the books? About making money? About improving the genre?
Personally, I’ve always thought it was about all of those things depending on who was doing the blogging but there is one more, though, possibly the most important one – the collecting, saving, & sharing of information, pure and simple – whatever the topic.
Because, where my father only had a steno-pad, newspapers, magazines, papers, pencils, pen, ink and maybe even a typewriter, we have the entire width and breath of the wide world web at our fingertips but no one person can see it all, at once or even over the course of a lifetime. So we break it down into our own little niches of interest, our own little areas of expertise, and our own little specialties of obsession. Then we search for, gather up and share information about all of those.
Continuously, a bite or two or three at a time. (And, yes, that was a tech/geek pun and probably a bad one at that.)
Blogging – a web log of information sharing around the world, person to person, no media middle-person needed.
So, yeah, my father would’ve made a great blogger. I just have no idea what his particular niche would’ve been. o.O
Although books would’ve probably figured in there somewhere. At least some of the time. 😉