The Blog Post Framework

Yesterday, I was talking to my friend Elaine (who I was about to feature, but after what happened... I'm not so sure)...  You would think that one of my oldest friends who knows everything about me there is to know would be reading my blog, but I'm finding out that that's not exactly so... or to what degree.  I mean, she is extremely busy with work and is always traveling and she usually prints out 20 pages of it and reads it on the plane once a month to catch up.

A week or so ago when I was having that bad couple of days, she couldn't get ahold of me (because I slept 15 hours) and she started worrying... so she finally thought to look at my blog and that might shed some light (since my whole life is vomited in print daily).  After she read it and then we talked, she felt better, and she vowed to "read it every day from now on".  So yesterday when I talked to her, she made it a point to say that she'd been keeping up with it every day and she started spouting off some posts to show her blog knowledge.  The first thing she said was about my friend Matt's dog Nick and how that was great how I brought him home and how was he doing, etc.  After being confused for 8 seconds (which felt like 3.5 minutes), I quickly realized that she was only skimming the first paragraph of each post and, had she read on, she would have known what happened with Nick, etc.

When I'm writing something, there is always this feeling that if it's too long, I'll lose the interest of the reader, so I try to keep it short... but sometimes, a bitch just has to say shit and I need more than a paragraph.  When I put together a post, there's usually the first paragraph, which is the fluffy back-story... then the lead-up and, finally, the dismount tie-in that wraps it all up, usually with a quip or antecdote.  And while some posts may seem like they are going nowhere... there's no point or the point is not in plain sight, I can assure you that, if you stuck it out (and I know some posts take up to 1.5 minutes to read)... it would come together. 

If you were going to skim, check out the blog post name (which usually gives a preview of what's to come)... look through the first paragraph for big and shiny $4.00 words.... and you'd definitely want to read the last paragraph and look at the pictures (which usually tie in somehow).