Appropriate Venues

[coalescent]

Yesterday morning I was up in Oxford for some work-related training (a talk/discussion group about transplantation and immunosuppressant drugs), and I took advantage of the trip to meet domh and hsenag for lunch. In amongst the conversation about Glastonbury tickets and infinite car parks there was, inevitably, some LJ-related discussion, in particular whether or not you actually read all the people you have on your friendslist.

It got me thinking. If you believe my friends-of list, one hundred and thirty-eight or so people are following this journal; but I know that's not actually the case. I know that a good portion of those people, probably at least half (and particularly most of the people I originally arrived on LJ with) could not care less about the SF-related stuff that I post. And these days, that's most of the stuff that I post.

The balance of my livejournal has gradually shifted. It used to be much more personal (the old journal, in particular; check out the difference in the mind maps). It changed for two main reasons. Firstly, I got burned by making (admittedly ill-judged) posts about Real Life, so that nowadays I'm very careful about writing about anything that involves other people. Things I do with people not on LJ tend not to get mentioned at all, and even things I do with people who are on LJ often get skimmed over; the rationale is 'if they want something mentioned, they'll mention it themselves'. When I do write something about my own life, it tends to be locked away, friends-only.

In parallel with that, from around Easter this year I picked up a whole lot of new (predominantly fannish) readers; my friends-of list has jumped upwards by about fifty people in six months. This can be, ah, a little intimidating. It's not so much that I feel obliged to provide content that those readers might be interested in, but that I'm reluctant to mention things that they're almost certainly not interested in, and my impression is that they friended me for the content.

So these days, this journal is pretty much a pure SF-blog, alternating between collections of links, reviews, and the (very) occasional bit of information about my life. Most of the time I'm not unhappy about this--in fact, I'm vain enough that sometimes I feel quite proud of it; having actual content, and so on--but every now and then it chafes. I feel a bit guilty that so much of my journal is inacessible to many of my friends, and I wonder whether this is the most appropriate venue for all of what I'm writing. And then I wonder whether, if it's not the most appropriate venue--if I should make this back into a more personal, me-journal--then where should I put the SF stuff?

domh suggested putting spare reviews on my website, possibly linking to them from here every so often. I did once intend to do this, and it's true that it has some advantages. I would have closer access to the content than I do here, and the pages wouldn't scroll off the bottom of someone's friendslist after twenty-four hours. I have reservations, though. Firstly, it would be marginally more hassle, even if that only involved setting up a template page. Secondly, Google quite likes my journal, and that has made me lazy; on the off-chance that I want to find an old review, I know that "coalescent foo bar" has a good chance of pulling it up (hell, in some cases I don't even need the 'coalescent'). Thirdly, I'm not convinced that most of the entries I write here really deserve that kind of archiving; they're not detailed analysis, after all, they are, by and large, first impressions. Fourthly, and possibly most importantly for my ego, my website has no comments function. It's true that I could learn about something like Movable Type, but I don't think it would be quite the same.

So, what other options are there? For a while I tried to put all my reviews into one big monthly pot over on instant_fanzine; I'll still keep making those posts, but I think I've decided that I prefer writing things up as I go, so as things are at the moment, those posts will probably become progressively more like a collection of links. I could change this policy and save up all my reviews for those posts. (Either way, incidentally, it means you could follow instant_fanzine and not this journal and probably not miss out on anything).

One option I've toyed with is creating a specific reviews journal. Probably specifically a short fiction reviews journal, since I can put book reviews on Diverse Books or similar. I'm quite fond of this idea; it could be the best of both worlds. I could put up notes on stories as I read them, then do occasional overviews here or in instant_fanzine every time I finish a magazine/anthology/month. It could even be a community rather than an individual journal, if anyone else would be interested in taking part.

I don't know. Perhaps I should just take the plunge and start posting things to rec.arts.sf.written. Alternatively, you could all tell me you're quite happy with my journal as it is, and that I have no need to change anything. Or I could just stop worrying about whether or not you're all happy, and add frivolous and/or personal posts to the mix as the mood takes me. Or, I could continue on as I have been.

Thoughts? Does anyone else ever feel similarly self-conscious, and if so, how do you/did you deal with it?