sin is whatever obscures the soul

1. How long have you been blogging? 6 years, 8 months exactly
2. What made you start? someone who was a friend at the time had a blog, and I both enjoyed the format and appreciated the ease with which one could communicate to a relatively large number of people, still fairly personally
3. Who inspired you? a personal friend at the time, and later some people I met through the greater blog-world
4. About how many hours a week would you estimate you spend on your blog? it varies widely. I've been trying to keep to a schedule of five days a week lately, so the posts have been a little shorter than they might be if they came more rarely. However, I prefer greater frequency to longer posts. If the content is photographic, a post can take a couple of hours to set up, organize, caption, and edit. Quizzes are variable. Some questions lend themselves to longer answers, while others are designed to garner only a string of one-word or short phrase answers. Even when I ramble, those do not take long to create. Extemporaneous essays, rants, lists, etc. are often some of the quickest to put together, because a topic will form in my mind before I settle in to write, and the actual typing will be the least of it. Poetry, though, is probably the fastest, because I have done so many that even the particular formatting that I use is standardized in my habits.
   That all being said, I spend probably 10 hours per week on the blog, between writing and editing posts, moderating and responding to comments, reformatting the backlog, and gathering topics for prospective posts. It is hardly a full-time job, but it is consuming, and could be much more so if I let it.
5. What kind of experience or background do you have with writing? I've been doing it since I was about three.
   No, seriously: ever since I realized that I'm not a photographer (have we all heard that story to death?), writing is it for me. A blog is a fine place to keep it.
6. Talk about how you come up with blog topics. Where do you get your ideas? Quizzes come from The Cat. Poetry comes from the place where I earn my paycheck, usually, though sometimes I manage to find it elsewhere. Although this space was not originally envisioned this way, I have come to see it as a sort of photo-blog and am enjoying sharing selective views of my "real life" through photos that I have taken at various points in my past. The essays, as anyone who has read any appreciable portion of the blog knows, come from anywhere and everywhere. My mind knows no boundaries.
   Some of my favorite posts have come as the result of specific questions or prompts from people who read the blog. I have really enjoyed, and been challenged by, my friends' inquisitiveness, inventiveness, and wonderfully high expectations. Please do not hesitate to share if the mood strikes.
7. What or who inspires you and your blog? Sin writes histories, goodness is silent.
   (Ger., Das Uebel macht eine Geschichte und das Gute keine.)
   [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]
8. Where and/or how do your brainstorming for your blog? anywhere. Everywhere. I write the blog the same way I do everything else I write: haphazardly and organically. If an idea comes to me while I'm at a friend's house, I scrawl it on a piece of paper and stuff it in my pocket. If I'm in a bar when brilliance arrives, I'll send myself a text message. It is not an organized, routine practice.
9. Do you have any blogging rules or guidelines you follow? avoid liability. Give attribution. Protect the innocent and reveal the guilty. Shine a light where it's needed. Take advantage of [relative] vagueness to call out bad behavior. And rarely, if ever, capitalize post titles.
10. Is there anything you will not blog about? specifics about the organization at which I spend my days. The identity of my family or my former spouse (with one exception that I can think of). Photographs of myself as an adult. I'm sure there is more in this category that's not coming to mind.
    Generally: I try to leave out the parts that people skip. (nod to Elmore Leonard)
11. Do you have any sort of a publishing schedule in terms of day of week or topic? not at all. I also don't pay any attention to meme scheduling. My time is my own.

[from The Cat, who got it here; title quotation by André Gide]