"You're a writer? What do you write?" "Letters."

Since my daily blog-a-thon in May, my pageviews have increased from 20-30 to about 125-150 per day. More and more of them are people I haven't actually met. I like this. I enjoy having an audience. If you like something I write, tell a friend. Now that I've broken the triple digits, I'm full of crazy ambition. Like, what if I had two hundred devoted readers?

I'm really working on feeling like blogging is "real" writing. It feels more real if there's an editor and your work gets accepted and published. Except that I have more readers at my blog than I had in most of the little magazines I used to sometimes publish in back in the day!

Also, blogging is really my genre. I do essays, sure. Almost never fiction. But from my first opportunity, I've had a knack for writing letters--I used to write very long, very detailed, very funny letters to friends in college. And I did my first "group letters" --which later evolved into a small e-mail list -- after I had left my Ph.D. program at Rutgers. I started writing long letters, making multiple copies, adding a cover, and sending them off to my group of friends from New Jersey. One of my friends, who was then living in Florida, told me that she read my letters out loud to her friends at parties. "Has anything come from Su?" they would ask when they saw her. And when it had, they would all get together at her place and kick back with a cold beer while she read to them.

It can be hard--well, it was hard for me--to accept that my special writing talent lies in writing letters. But it does. Even when I spent a month at a writing retreat many years ago, my main output was long group letters to Raider and some other friends. I sent one almost every day. Sometimes two a day. This was before people had e-mail access routinely; it cost me a mint in stamps.

I wrote a lot of other stuff, too. But what I really loved and could not get enough of was writing letters.

Blogging is like that. When you read one of my blog posts, you might be interested to know that they read very much like my letters do. A typical letter might include some funny stories about my kids; some fretful processing about something that's on my mind; a snarky book review (or a non-snarky one); a story or two about people I've met. Pretty much like the blog, except that I don't tend to do all of those things in a single blog post, and I have to be a bit more discreet about storytelling.

I thought I was going to go on to talk about something else, but I think that's it for now. Your takeaway: Feed my overweening ambition! Point interested friends in my direction!

(Edited to add: Apparently this is my twelve-dozenth post! Woo-hoo!)