Sign The Friggin’ Blog Posts?
In the grander scheme of building our audience reach, the Beard’s been researching other writers. Not a bad thing, except it fills his head with ideas. Ideas are great things. Writers adore ideas. We covet them, court them, and nurture them. It’s the ideas others have for us that can drive us a bit mad. Okay, a little madder.
I poke fun at the Beard. He’s fun to poke, but he’s devoted to my writing career. His devotion takes a different form than mine. Being an engineer, the lens of his perspective is vastly different. People who know us separately succumb to shock when they find out we’re a couple. Good Writing Team. It’s not remarkable, we share many of the same aesthetics. We’re SciFi, comic book, sarcasm geeks. While I’m equally an extrovert, we are both high functioning introverts. Granted, I have a better eye for style.
The beauty of our symmetry is the balance of our asymmetry. Our differences complement each other. He’s detail oriented and a planner. I’m a planner who tends not to sweat the small stuff. This entire book process has been a steep learning curve and we discover something new almost every day.
The Beard didn’t spend the two weeks at the holidays off solely irritating me. He used his genius, techy brain to analyze other authors and their platform models. Not ‘scoping out’ the competition he says, but seeing what’s working for folks and what’s not. He uses his analysis to tweak our Twitter feed, to streamline our website, and to evaluate where we generate our best traffic.
And the Beard hit me with this little gem.
“Ever think about signing your posts?” He asks.
“What?” I ask trying to keep my forehead smooth. Frowning causes wrinkles.
His voice slows as he realizes he’s hit a nerve. “I’ve noticed several bloggers sign their posts.”
“I wrap up my posts with a tidy few sentences uniting the theme and clearly indicating the end. Besides, the end should indicate the end.” I snipe thinking about opening a bottle of wine even though I’m cutting back. Note, it’s not my intention to insult any of you who sign your posts. It’s just not me.
“It was just a suggestion.” The Beard is good at backing away quickly.
Unfortunately, he’s also crazy talented at working me up into a rant. I went for a few more minutes about how I didn’t think my posts needed a signature. My bloody name is on the website init?
I’m trying to keep up with the tweets. My blog posts are on schedule. I’m actually instagramming and The Beard has Tumblr covered, or so he tells me. I’m struggling with editor notes and moving forward on the new book. In the meantime, consider this post wrapped up.
Enter signature here.
Oh, how this reminds me of my husband and I. (I don’t have a nickname for him–at least not one I should share here.) He’s also an engineer and we both work from home, but fortunately, we stay in our respective spaces with our respective work. I wouldn’t know where to begin with software engineering and he leaves the writing up to me. Anyway . . . I’m with you on the signage; it doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’m not writing a letter when I write a blog post. As you say, the name of the blog says it all.
Right?!