(orig. photo courtesy commons.wikimedia.org)

Happy Blog Day to Meeee….Wing’s World turns 100 posts today. I should buy myself a card.

Actually, I’m only half-joking. Given the number of people like me, mostly over-30s (OK, let’s be honest, even more of us are old enough to be the PARENTS of the over-30s), who have dived into blogging recently, Hallmark & their ilk could probably make a killing selling “Congrats! You’ve Reached Your 100th Post” cards. “From Your Sister-in-Law on Your 100th Post.” “To My Darling on the Anniversary of Her 100th Post.”

The cards could feature a long fence line, you know, made of…wooden…yeah, alright, you get it.

But none of us new bloggers would buy a paper card, would we? We’d be too busy showing off our mastery of the ecard. “Look at me, doing technology!”

Half the time, that really is what it feels like. When I was a little kid, my parents used to let me have a sip of their wine at dinner sometimes. I only took that sip after announcing, “Look at me! I’m drinking wine!” (Yeah, guess who’s the youngest in her family?)

Why this sudden upsurge? Because, like Mt. Everest, the internet is just…there? For some, I’m sure that’s true–reaching out with their thoughts is just a natural extension of, say, chatting to a stranger on a bus.

For people like me, though, starting to blog felt like signing up for a colonoscopy. “Do I really hafta? I know, I know, this is supposed to be good for me…How about if I wait a year and then do it?”

So fine: I started Wing’s World. But…starting to blog REGULARLY? “What does the world WANT from me?? Why can’t I just say my piece once a month and then retire with my dignity intact?”

I’ll tell you what got me going, and what probably motivated a whole bunch of my bloggin’ cohorts: FEAR.

What if I wrote a book…and nobody came?

A painter can at least put her masterpiece in a window for people to walk past and see, even if no one wants to buy. But an author? We have to PUBLISH. We have to get individual books before individual sets of eyes.

And that means we have to attract those eyes our way.

But eyes, it turns out, aren’t enough. In fact, if all your eyes saw were a stream of advertisements, “Buy my book! Buy my book! Buymybookbuymybookbuymybook…” stretching off into the sunshine like a line of fenceposts…you’d look away.

So my job is to get you to feel like you WANT to buy my book, because…drum roll!…you think I’m an interesting person, and you like the way I write.

And that, my friends, is why I blog. Or why I STARTED blogging. But an interesting thing happened on the way to the 100th post.

I began to enjoy myself. Turns out I really like talking with y’all.

So, here’s to Happy 100. Here’s to the next. Here’s to you, for reading, and to me, for writing, and…to whatever comes next as the line of posts marches into the distance.

How about you? Do you blog, happily or reluctantly? How many other blogs do you read? Do you sometimes suffer from “blog overload?” Do you wish the whole blogosphere had never been invented? Let me hear!