Saturday, December 17, 2011

Another one bites the dust

What the title is referring to is the fact that the Lipstick Chronicles blog is bidding adieu to the blogosphere.

Lipstick has been a great group blog written by some of the coolest women mystery writers today: Nancy Martin, Elaine Viets, Harley Jane Kozak, Sarah Strohmeyer, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Margaret Maron, and, well, you get the picture. It's been around since May 2005, when mystery writers were grouping up and forming all those cool blogs (I do have to add here that my former blog, First Offenders, was if not the first then one of the very first, starting in October 2005, but FO hung up its hat some time ago).

In the final blog post, the Tarts as they call themselves explain that Facebook and Twitter and, well, WRITING, actually is taking up a lot more time these days. And their hit numbers are going down.

That last reason is something I've been thinking about a long time. No one seems to be reading blogs anymore. And yes, I realize the irony of me writing that sentence in a blog post. But it's true.

I haven't posted much in the last few months, mainly because I've had a lot of other things going on my life and just not enough time. But another reason is that sometimes I forget I even have this blog because I'm not reading blogs like I used to and I wonder if anyone really cares what I have to say. Especially since I haven't had much to say at all lately. My writing is going in fits and starts and I can't really talk about what I've been reading for reasons that may become known later. I don't know that I want this blog to be about more than that, either. I could start blogging about my daughter's new sport: fencing. But I don't know much about fencing yet, and does anyone really want to know about that? I could post about my cats, which could be popular, but unless I figure out how to take video, it's really not all that interesting.

So I figure I'll post here when I think I have something to say, and any of you out there who want to read it, will read it.

But I'll leave you with a question: Have you been a big fan of blogs? Do you still read them like you used to? Or do you think that Facebook and Twitter and other social media have pushed blogs aside, making them a little irrelevant?