If you have a Blog and it has your Book cover, your author/business name, and all the other things that you use to promote your books, it is a professional Blog.
If the Blog title indicates that this is a rant Blog and you are using it to speak your mind and let the world know what you think about every little thing, then consider it personal.
I strongly discourage you from combining the two. Why you ask? Simple. Personal preference. If you are Jewish and you are angry about something that the Catholic church has done to a friend and you vent your disgust of the church, you are alienating every single Catholic reader who might have read your cozy mystery that has nothing to do with religion.
She gives other examples, but this is the Pill of Death for me:
I'm not telling you to be Pollyanna, but I am suggesting that you not be the type of person who no one wants to know or care about.
Well, who would those people happen to be?
Most likely the people I despise to begin with!
Readers are sensitive and they deserve to be treated with respect. Pushing your angst off onto them isn't the best way to do that.
In two words: Fuck that!
I'm not looking for sensssssitive readers. The world is being sent hellbent into a sewer because of sensssssitivity. Sensssssitive is a coward's cloak for absolving the onrush of shit.
My blog is mine. You are free to make yours into something virtually indistinguishable from one put up by a Suit. And if you do, don't expect me to be interested in your books! You can go ahead and count on sales from that portion of the potential audience. I won't have that lot smearing their eyes across my words (and should they happen to, let them have to rush to the medicine cabinet for an application of eye drops to assuage their pain!).
Her advice would lead to books just as bland as the blogs she would like to see.
One item she cites is immediately relevant to a prominent writer:
If you are homophobic and you complain about gays kissing in public, you will alienate every single gay person who loves to read fantasy novels just like yours!
Orson Scott Card has recently published a very long column about how he opposes gay marriage. In fact, it seems he has a great deal of problems with the very idea of homosexuality.
I hold a thoroughly opposite stance to his.
Does this make him any less of a writer in my eyes? Am I going to stop buying his books because of what he believes?
In four words: Grow the fuck up!
What this blog posting of hers advocates is a prissy schoolmarmish Adhere To My Personal Checklist view of life that I find totally disgusting and arguably anti-human.
I detest drug use. Some of the best writers have flaunted their drug use: Charles Baudelaire and Philip K. Dick, to just name two off the top of my fevered head. Should I stop reading them because -- oh my god! -- some child might get a hold of their biographies and get the idea that, "Hey, they did drugs, so it must be OK for me too?"
In four words again: Grow the fuck up!
I despise drunks. Should I hold that against the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Bukowski?
Must I repeat the four words of advice?
Without attribution, let me give all of you a peek into the kind of eejit she would have writers turn into. I keep this passage in my LifeDrive under this title: Idiot's idea of writers:
In June of 1996, in a letter to a friend about the literary life, in which she quoted Yeats, Robert Louis Stevenson and the *Pogo* cartoon strip, [she] wrote, "I just believe that inside every great poet and elegant thinker there dwells a Winnie the Pooh who must have A Little Something at about four o'clock. Poetry and philosophy aside, enlightened folk recognize each other through shared universal values -- a reliable Swiss Army knife, Hunny, songs beside a driftwood fire, a cuddly stuffed animal for sleeping with and a well-shaped dry martini.
Aw, isn't that just so cute that it makes you want to rush to vomit?!
What the fuck kind of writer is that?!
Not one I'd read. Not one likely to have anything to say, either!
The blog post I'm pointing to is by a publisher.
More evidence for writers to stay the fuck away from them!
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