Days When the Dog Ate My Post

The other night I happened to read a post on the IZEA/SocialSpark blog about the quality blog content required to fall in true linky love:

"Is your blog something I can be proud to talk about on my blog? Do you feature original content that invites your readers' interest? Having a personal blog is a good way to chronicle your daily life for family and friends. Your mother wants to know how the weather looks outside your window and what you're wearing to work today. Most of the rest of us don't and won't become regular visitors if that's as good as your content gets. If you want to build your readership (and get some linky lovin') you have to give your readers a bit more of yourself. How many blogs have you seen that look something like this:

Day One:

• Three-line weather report
• Sponsored post
• Short paragraph about the baby being cranky
• Sponsored post
  Roast is in the oven. Out of lettuce - no salad

Day Two:

• Sponsored post
• Three-line weather report
• Sponsored post
• Baby still cranky
• Sponsored post

and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam."

I'll frequently see a fellow blogger offering up advice on how to keep Entrecarders (or other visitors) coming back for more. I think we all know when we've written a post that is going to win every Battle of the Blogs by a wide margin, and when we've written "just enough to get paid." However, I'd like to say a word or two hundred in defense of my own "dog ate my post" days.

Before I ever started blogging, I kept a handwritten journal, and I still do. Way back when, before I met Rex and had a family to keep me busy, my most intriguing "posts" often came during a time of solitude and introspection, when I had plenty of time to create a dark, well-written Roxiticus Memoir because I didn't have a date or a fun weekend with my girlfriends to distract me. These days, I find that I don't write as much or as well as I could about my day-to-day adventures because I'm too busy living them. Not that I don't think about my loyal Roxiticus Desperate Housewives readers all the time, I do… to the point where it drives Rex nuts, and London and Maddie joke that "Mommy wouldn't have forgotten to [fill in the blanks] if she wasn't always blogging!"

While thoroughly enjoying Movin' Out at NJPAC last Thursday night, I thought about all the things I wanted to say about all the memories the show brought back and how I might post some Roxy flashbacks along with related Billy Joel lyrics, but I didn't take the time to write them down. The next day, I ended up writing what I thought was a half-decent post about Adega Grill, the Newark restaurant where we had dinner that night, but I had my investment banking work to attend to until we left for the beach and I never got back to Movin' Out because Father's Day Weekend got in the way (in a good way)!

All that being said, Rex and the girls and I had an absolutely glorious Father's Day Weekend at our beach house in Bay Head, New Jersey, and I'm going to try to do it justice with a post over on my Bay Head Blog.