Instructions to the Double...Background Leading Up To the Roxiticus Desperate Housewives Third Blogiversary

Roxiticus Desperate Housewives is coming up on its 3-Year Blogiversary on August 5, 2008. Looking through old magazines I've collected haphazardly at our beach house, I came across a stack of papers bound together with bulldogs. The collection turned out to be my August 2005 printout of Instructions to the Double, the blog that inspired me to blog. It now feels like a silly idea to print out a blog, since everyone's banal maundering is readily accessible online. In fact, I've joked with Matt over at MTMD about services I read about in my early blogging days that offered to compile all of a blogger's printed blog posts into a handsome leather-bound volume, and I feel certain that Matt will be surprising me with just such a tribute on August 5th. However, in this case it turns out that I am glad I printed out the hundreds of pages of Instructions to the Double. The blogger, "Tess," deleted most of her blog archives, leaving only a handful of old posts and no trace of her ongoing existence online. So I have the stack of pages that runs for less than a year, from October 7, 2004 to the end of July 2005, here on the beach with me for a blogiversary memorial re-reading. Back in the summer/early fall 2005, I had tracked down "Tess" at her new blog about her master's degree program at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. But at some point Tess abandoned that blog as well, leaving me wondering what has happened in her life over the past three years.

It also turns out that Tess' writing/blogging style was a rare find. Since I returned to blogging in earnest and surfing other people's blogs (OPB) in February 2008, thanks to BlogExplosion and EntreCard, I have discovered quite a few blogs that I enjoy reading (and exchanging comments) on a regular basis. The Catch-22 with all of my favorite bloggers, however, is that they WANT people to read their blogs. Bloggers who work to drive traffic to their blogs are "writing to be read." Tess' Instructions to the Double blog read like a very well-written personal diary, the memoir of someone who was not aware of her audience.

I'm going to write more about Tess and Instructions to the Double as we count down to the Official Roxiticus Desperate Housewives Third Year Blogiversary....stay tuned.