Welcome to My Blog

Hello! Welcome to my blog!

The basic idea behind this is to serve as a response blog. I am hoping to post my responses to things that interest me here. I tend to be more interested in art than in life; thus, more of my responses will probably be to art than to life, although this is a prediction, not a rule. In particular, I like the narrative arts and music, so I expect to focus on those areas. Again - prediction, not rule.

What kind of responses can you expect? Fundamentally, I think they'll end up falling somewhere in between "review" and "paper." I don't generally enjoy writing that's focused entirely around whether or not I enjoyed something - that kind of evaluative text doesn't inspire me to think about the kinds of topics I like to think about. On the other hand, if I wanted to write analytically deep, impersonal academic papers all the time, I'd get a PhD, not write a blog. Thus, I have no intention whatsoever of concealing my likes and dislikes. The closest match to the kind of tone I'm going for is probably Micole's blog - she ends up writing more reviews than I really intend to, but a post like this (warning, Angel Season 5 spoilers) is a good example of the kind of writing I'm interested in. But I'm also interested in incredibly short posts that just comment on something amusing to me!

In terms of audience, I'm going to be writing posts with the idea in mind of talking to mythical people out there who share all of my interests but do not personally know me. Obviously, no such person is likely to exist. However, there are definitely real people out there who share some of my interests but do not personally know me. Therefore, if anyone outside of my family ends up reading the blog, I fully expect it to be people who just wander in for a single entry that they happen to find because they're looking for the topic on Google (there is a sad lack of blog entries on Dave Duncan's Man of His Word series, for instance) and then wander out again. That's fine! I'm happy to have long-term readers but don't demand them; I would be very cheerful indeed to have a conversation with someone about something we both like to talk about, even if I never hear from them again.

The combination of the preceding two paragraphs should help to explain my spoiler policy - expect spoilers on any topic I discuss. I'm writing responses, for a hypothetical audience of people who also want to respond to whatever it is that I'm responding to, so the more we can discuss details, the better. I will try to provide tags for each post that detail what I'm talking about, though, so, if spoilers bother you, check the tags. If spoilers don't bother you, that's fine, too!

Finally, this is a pseudonymous blog, for largely psychological reasons - I feel more comfortable making my likes and dislikes very clear and expressing my analysis when I know that no one is going to be judging me for it. As I've already said, I don't intend to engage with whatever I respond to on a purely intellectual level, but I don't feel comfortable publicly fangirling too much, either. I'd rather you think about the writer of this blog as Grace Mulligan and not as me. Otherwise, I don't think I could post.

Next post will be about me, so if you're interested in what kind of things I'm liable to post about, you can get a list of my interests, there.