Thank you for reading Madam Mayo blog. It’s a wonder to me that, as a writer of books, I am still embracing this not altogether embraceable genre called “blogging,” heading into year 17. It’s been a wiggy ride to have been blogging from the dawn of the genre, along with that of social media, then through the doldrums as social media overshadowed the blogosphere, and into the resurgence of blogging in this, the Present Rhinocerosness. Sometimes now, as with the Substackers, bloggers call their blog a “newsletter.” How to distinguish a “blog” from an emailed newsletter or, for that matter, from a video-blog (v-log) or a podcast? It gets fuzzy. Sometimes it’s all of the above.
Embracing the not altogether embraceable: My writing assistant demonstrates the concept.
From near-daily scattershot Twitter-like posts in 2006, gradually, over the years, I’ve come to settle on a schedule of posting on Mondays, focusing on subjects related to my books; my writing workshop; and whatever other writers and works catch my interest (and perhaps also yours?).
For those of you new to this blog: to date, most of my writing has had to do with Mexico; my current work-in-progress is on Far West Texas, which includes a hefty chunk of the US-Mexico borderlands— so you will find a cornucopia of posts about Mexico and Texas. I also occasionally post on literary translation and the typosphere.
My book writing needs to step up a notch, so from now through the end of 2022, look for a post every other first Monday of the month on Texas Books (apropos of that work in-progress); every other second Monday of the month a post for my workshop; every other third Monday a post related to my own work, past or in-progress (and more of the Marfa Mondays Podcasts); and every other fourth Monday, aQ & A with a fellow writer. When the month has a fifth Monday, I’ll post a newsletter. As ever, at year’s end I’ll post my top books read list.
Contemplating going forward into year 16. My writing assistant demonstrates the concept.
First of all, thank you, dear readers. I can hardly believe it but Madam Mayo blog has been zinging around the planet for 15 years.
It feels peculiar to say it, but it is a fact: with Madam Mayo blog I am one of the pioneers of literary blogging, so I thought I’d take this occasion to offer a few reflections on how Madam Mayo has evolved along with the blogosphere, and where it’s all going.
I started posting in 2006, keeping at it steadily ever since, even while persistently scratching my head over the nature of the genre and pondering my own motivations for continuing. Suffice to say, Madam Mayo blog started as a wee adventure born of curiosity one lazy afternoon, then as I was promoting my anthology Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion and a new paperback edition of my travel memoir, Miraculous Air, it quickly morphed into near-daily posts that resembled tweets—this before the advent of Twitter. Younger readers who do not recall the pre-Internet age of publishing might find it hard to believe, but writers such as myself actually got paid, sometimes hundreds of dollars, for their articles, plus a few fork loads more for accompanying photographs. In 2006 it therefore did not occur to me to craft a proper article and serve it up for free on my (the word then pronounced with disdain) blog.
Then came Twitter. As I experimented with Twitter and other social media, and then slowly…. backed…. away…. from social media, and the publishing world went warp speed into gawdnozewhut, Madam Mayo blog, which I quite enjoyed writing, began to develop into something a little meatier.
# 1. Maybe not everyone else is, but I remain charmed by the name of my blog, Madam Mayo.
#2. Whoa, blogging has an opportunity cost!
#3. But on the plus side, like a workout sprints for a marathoner, blogging helps me stay in shape as a writer.
#4. Although my ego would like Madam Mayo blog to draw legions of passionate followers, all perched at the edge of their seats for my next post, ready to fly to their keyboards with their hailstorm of comments… The fact is, writing that strives for an ever-larger following is not the best strategy for me as a literary artist or as a person.
#5. Not all, certainly, but a sizable number of people who trouble to comment on blogs seem stuck in Emotional Kindergarten.
#6. Blogging is very much like publishing a literary short story or book— it goes out into the world to an opaque response.
#7. More on the plus side: sharing what I call cyberflanerie and celebrating friends and colleagues and books and all wonder of things is a delight.
#8. Madam Mayo blog is not so much my so-called “platform,” but rather, a net that catches certain special fish— the readers who care about the things I care to write about.
Of course I do have a few things to add to those 8 conclusions, another 7 years having moseyed on by, to wit:
Madam Mayo blog is: -a form of service– to my readers, my workshop students, and fellow writers -a broadcast of news of my works via both RSS feeds and search engines -a showcase for my works (excerpts from my books, articles, translations, and podcasts) -a record of sorts (my reading, publications, thinking on various topics)— ye olde “weblog” -a virtual filing cabinet for some of my notes and other research (for example) -a yoga -an exercise in will -just playing in the editor-and-“house style”-free fun zone
It seems that, with noted exceptions, most of the literary bloggers active back in 2006-2010 have quit the game or turned to posting only infrequently. On the other hand, it has not escaped my notice that many of the more popular bloggers now invite donations via PayPal, Patreon, or some other corporate intermediary. Some have established paywalls. Substack seems to be the platform du jour.
As a reader, I keep a reading list of go-to blogs, and I even, gratefully, pay for a few of them (and for a few—very few— I even abide the Google ads). Plus I subscribe to a wild and ever-changing variety of emailed newsletters. (What’s the difference between a blog and an emailed newsletter? Sometimes there isn’t.) Some of these blogs and newsletters might surprise you, no matter where you might expect to find me on the political spectrum. I do a lot of triangulation, shall we say. Put another way, I make a practice of doing intellectual triangle poses—and backbends and headstands! I believe it’s vital to always strive to truly see, and that requires not only limberness, but willingness to look outside and beyond one’s comfort zone, outside and beyond convention and, relatedly, outside and beyond the click-bait and the rest of the slop served up on mainstream media. But that would be another post.
Anyway, none of those, Patreon, PayPal, Substack, Google ads, et al, are for Madam Mayo blog, which is ever and always my gift— a gift some readers appreciate, a gift some readers don’t (to them, I say, tootle-oo!). What I, C.M. Mayo, offer up for the clams are my books. And sometimes writing workshops.
Another point: As for those financial intermediaries such as Patreon and free platforms such as Medium and Blogger, I am loath to build up my content and subscriber base sharecropping on some corporation’s turf—and only moreso in this brave new world that too often strikes me as Gleischschaltung meets Lord of the Flies meets 1984. Therefore, a good while ago, I started migrating Madam Mayo blog from its free Google-owned Blogger platform to self-hosted WordPress (read about that here). In other words, I own the domain name, I pay for hosting—and I can move to another hosting company anytime I please with a few clicks on my keyboard. I keep both digital and print-out backups of the posts, should anything go wiggy with WordPress.
For email subscriptions I use Mad Mimi, and I’m a happy customer, however, as I learned the hard way after my previous email service, the-monkey-with-the-banana one, deleted my account for reasons known to itself, I export and download my blog’s mailing list on the last day of each and every month.
GOING FORWARD IN 2021
My sense is that from the get-go, the blogosphere has been a noodle fest with some clods thrown in, and it will remain so. True, most kidz these dayz don’t wanna hafta read—they’ll smombie on to the visual candy on Instagram, TikTok, and the like. (Well, yeah, complaining about kids, it’s been a thing since before the fall of Troy.) Nonetheless, certain individual writers and journalists’ blogs will become increasingly influential, for various different reasons, with various niche audiences, some tiny, some impressively large. However without an editorial board to oversee these cowboys & cowgirls (cowpersons?), curating a reading list of them falls to the reader. This is not an easy task. Nonetheless, as a reader, I can attest that it has its rewards.
What can you expect from Madam Mayo blog going forward in 2021? Monday posts, as ever: first Mondays on Texas Books; second Mondays something chewy for my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing; third Mondays something of or about my work (past or in-progress, mainly focusing on Mexico and Texas); and fourth Mondays, a Q & A with another writer. Come on back next Monday when literary essayist Susan Tweit, author of the memoir Bless the Birds, offers her fascinating As to my Qs.
This year is sweet sixteen for Madam Mayo blog. I plan on having fun and offering to you, dear reader, new things to ponder in this beautiful Tilt-A-Whirl world.
Methuselah of Blogdom here. Why am I still blogging? I am heartened to say, dear readers, that I know you’re there, more of you each year, and I appreciate your visits and your comments (as always, I welcome comments via email, see below.)
As for the granular whys and wherefores of this blog, I wouldn’t say much that I didn’t say last year, on its tenth anniversary, which echoed much of what I had to say on its eighth anniversary. The latter link goes to my talk for the 2014 AWP Conference panel on “Homesteading on the Digital Frontier: Writer’s Blogs.” To quote from that:
Madam Mayo blog is not so much my so-called “platform,” but rather, a net that catches certain special fish— the readers who care about the things I care to write about.
As ever, I aim to provide posts on a variety of topics that might be, in turn, of use and/or interest for my writing workshop students, and/or for Mexicophiles, and/or for Far West Texasphiles (is that a word?), adventurous readers, and myself.
One of my many motivations for blogging is to iron out my own thoughts, especially on subjects that tend to come up in my correspondence with other writers and in my writing workshops, for example:
P.S. For those of you who are writers / bloggers, herewith the top five things I would have done differently back in 2006 had I known what I know now: 1. Use WordPress 2. Post once per week, something verily crunchy, otherwise take a vacation; 3. Post interviews with other writers more often; 4. Maybe tweet the link to a post once or twice; otherwise do not waste time with social media; 5. When possible and when there is substantive content, upload the bulk of that content to the webpage, not the blog itself (because of those scraper sites).
P.P.S. Yep, one of these days I will move the whole enchilada over to WordPress. It’s still on my to-do list… [UPDATE JANUARY 2019: This blog is now on self-hosted WordPress at www.madam-mayo.com]
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
This is the edited transcript of my talk for the Associated Writing Programs conference panel discussion “Homesteading the Digital Frontier: Writers’ Blogs.”
How to blog, how not to blog… that was a hot topic a few years ago, when blogging was new, and indeed in 2008, for the Maryland Writers Association conference I gave a talk on the best practices for writers’ blogs. But that was then and this is now. Now I don’t have so much advice; what I have are some conclusions about what’s right for me and, sort of maybe kind of, by extension, for other literary writers. There isn’t any one right way to do this– what might annoy this reader enchants another, and anyway, someone is always barging in with something new.
To switch metaphors: this genre is built of jelly. Electrified jelly in rainbow hues.
I started blogging with Madam Mayo back in the spring of 2006. I kept at it, blogging once, twice, sometimes more often, every week. By the end of this March it will have been eight years. What have I concluded?
# 1. Maybe not everyone else is, but I remain charmed by the name of my blog, Madam Mayo.
It seems almost nobody gets that it’s a play on Madam Mao. Oh well! It still makes me chuckle.
# 3. But on the plus side, like a workout sprints for a marathoner, blogging helps me stay in shape as a writer.
Indeed, if I hadn’t been blogging over these past 8 years, perhaps I would not have been as productive as a writer. So maybe the opportunity cost was the other way around! But that’s probably wishful thinking. My sense is I blogged just the right amount for me at the time. I blogged more frequently the first couple of years, back when I was still trying to get my mind around the nature of the genre. Looking forward: Best for me to blog once a week, maybe twice.
# 4. Although my ego would like Madam Mayo blog to draw legions of passionate followers, all perched at the edge of their seats for my next post, ready to fly to their keyboards with their hailstorm of comments… The fact is, writing that strives for an ever-larger following is not the best strategy for me as a literary artist or as a person.
Egos are like big dogs. They protect you, they love you, but they bark a lot and sometimes they slobber. For me—a literary writer whose focus through several books in multiple genres has been examining various regions and aspects and periods of Mexico in an international context, numbers of followers… well, let me put it this way: If what I’d really wanted was a mass following, I wouldn’t be writing the kinds of books I’m writing. QED.
# 5. Not all, certainly, but a sizable number of people who trouble to comment on blogs seem stuck in Emotional Kindergarten.
One day they shall evolve to their next educational opportunity; meanwhile, I am not in the business of managing snotty little brats pushing each other off the swings in Blogland. Therefore I do not manage nor publish comments on my blog. But because I hope I am not shouting into the wind here— I do care about hearing from thoughtful, civilized readers— I always include a link that goes to a contact page on my website. So, with two clicks away from my blog post, any reader can send me an email. What I have very happily learned is that spammers and trolls don’t bother. That extra click and knowing in advance that their comment will probably not be published, wow, that is a Mount Rainier-sized barrier. With my no comments but email link in place, so far, fingers crossed, I have yet to receive an email from anyone but the readers I want to have, that is, courteous and intelligent people.
# 6. Blogging is very much like publishing a literary short story or book— it goes out into the world to an opaque response.
We might scare up some numbers, say, as how many people clicked on a blog post and at what time of day via which search engine, or how many bookstores ordered how many copies of a book. But even with endless hours of crunching through, say, Google Analytics, we may never know the reaction of every single reader. All of us read thousands of things we never comment on, dozens and dozens of books we will never review, we will never write to the author—although some of these works may prove deeply meaningful to us in the course of our lives. As anyone who has published a blog or a book knows, sometimes the silence can be downright eerie. So if you want to write a book or a blog post, it helps to have the tough-mindedness to accept that maybe… you will never know the true, full nature of the response. Maybe the person who will most appreciate a given blog post has not yet been born. Or maybe my best blog post will find its biggest fan next week. Maybe what I said yesterday changed someone’s life today in… Australia. I don’t know. And that’s OK. I write anyway. That is the kind of writer I am.
# 7. More on the plus side: sharing what I call cyberflanerie and celebrating friends and colleagues and books and all wonder of things is a delight.
(In ye olden days, we would take scissors and cut things out of magazines and end up with overstuffed files full of yellowing papers. Difficult to share.)
# 8. Madam Mayo blog is not so much my so-called “platform,” but rather, a net that catches certain special fish— the readers who care about the things I care to write about.
This last conclusion is the one that took me the longest to reach. It seems obvious to me now, and it probably will for you also, but back when blogs were new it was difficult to appreciate both their nature and their potential. Back when, most people thought of them as a diary—a web log— which is how we got the term “blog.” The idea, supposedly, was to talk about yourself, frequently. I know it turned off a lot of writers at the time. I had zero interest in blogging about my personal life.
Another way writers thought about blogs— and at first I had a foot in this camp— was as a digital newspaper column. If you were good, if you put out well-crafted and witty and super informative posts, you’d get readers. You’d be famous! You could sell more of your books! Wow, maybe even sell ads and ka-ching, ka-ching!
But of course, anybody can start a blog. The gates blown open, suddenly, there popped up a million wonderful and a zillion crappy blogs, and everything in between, all muddled up together. Back in 2007, 2008, most serious writers I knew turned their noses up at blogging, as something for wannabes, for kids. But by 2009, 2010, those same writers, nagged by their publishers’ marketing staffs, had started blogging to promote their books. (From what I can see from all those blogs that petered out once the book tour was over, or sometimes not even halfway through, if marketing a book is the only goal, one is unlikely to be able to sustain the energy to keep at it for more than a few months, at best.)
But here’s the wonder: The diary and the newspaper column of yore were not searchable the way digital material is. The paper diary was tucked in someone’s drawer; the newspaper, after a day, lined the bottom of the proverbial parrot cage. OK, a very few people might go search things cataloged in a library. And a collection of newspaper articles might end up in a book… one day. But basically, massive an audience as some newspapers columnists enjoyed, before the digital revolution, their writing was ephemeral.
A blog, however, can be found at anytime by anyone anywhere (OK, maybe not in Burma). As people search for words, phrases, topics, names, and come upon Madam Mayo, and its many blog posts with many links to whatever interests me and all about my works, books, ebooks, podcasts, articles, newsletter, and so on and so forth, it serves as a kind of net that catches a certain kind of fish. Over time, as I continue to blog, to add tags and links, my fishnet grows. So now, after 8 years, I have a very big fishnet. And some very nice fish have come in. Though I don’t know who you all are, I sincerely appreciate you, dear readers. Cheers to you!
