the (mock) bloggicide of Lukas Wetzel

Right now I'm sitting at a table in the back of Bo Ling's Chinese Restaurant, alternately sipping from a purple taro milk bubble tea and a variety of colorful cocktails in big paper-umbrella-covered glasses. In front of me sits a giant platter of fortune cookies. One by one, I remove the cookies from their wrappers and eat them, without even bothering to remove the fortunes. As I do so, I look back on my career so far as a writer, blogger, and sufferer of much heartbreak and adventure...

There comes a time in every blogger's life when he must ask himself if he wishes to continue blogging. Few blogs these days survive their infancy, and a fitting epitath for many a blog might be, "No sooner am I done for/I wonder what I was begun for."

My own baby steps in the blogosphere were well-intentioned. I wanted to have fun, tell a few stories, show off some of my girlfriend's photographs and maybe share a song or two. But my path strayed into stagnation, schizophrenia and awkward silences, and a lack of comments spelled out a virtual vote of no confidence on behalf of my (imaginary?) readership.

To make matters worse, my friends' blogs began dying out, and I felt like my namesake Mr. Skywalker on Ice Planet Hoth, stumbling about half-blind on a cold and uncaring planet. Only instead of Hoth's wampas and tauntauns, a different set of predators thrives on the Internet. Unmanned spambots and porn drones patroll the premises, and celebrity smut-peddlers sell soul in exchange for advertising space. Honesty is a liability, and you never know for sure who is watching you.

These are hardly conditions to live in, much less a place to get any real writing done. But to be perfectly honest, I never intended for this blog to outlive my 25th year. As some of you may have noticed, the title of this site is a nod to Goethe's "The Sufferings of Young Werther," the 18th-century epistolary novel in which an overromantic hero does himself in when the girl he loves gets betrothed to some other guy. I figured that, because Goethe published this book when he was 25, I would bury my own Web log sufferings at the same age.

But as uncomfortable as I've grown in this online space, I can still remember what made blogging fun in the first place. You can write about whatever you want, you can make up your own rules, and you might even reach someone. So before I blow the brains out of "The Recently Updated Sufferings of Young Wetzel," I would like to bequeath a few tips to any aspiring bloggers out there who want to give this form of communication a try.

Have Fun With It
Otherwise there's no point

Don't Take It Too Seriously
Why should you?

Keep It Short
Never was my strong point, though I've come to see how brevity probably best suits this format. As my friend Mabel once said, "Sometimes I'll have 10 minutes at work and want to read something fun, so I'll swing by your page only to see some 12,000 word essay on godknowswhat, and I think...this isn't really what I'm looking for right now."

Take into consideration that blogs are publicly accessible (but don't let that cramp your style too much)
A anonymous, or semi-anonymous author credit is not a bad idea. And you obviously don't want to boast too much about doing drugs or committing crimes that might be traceable to your IP address. But don't be overwhelmed by the thought that you're putting stuff out there "for the whole world to see." Because that's actually pretty unlikely.

Be Consistent/Have a Plan
It's easier to maintain a blog, and often more satisfying for readers, if your blog has a consistent theme. My favorite blogs have been written by friends who are traveling, teaching abroad, or writing about a specific thing or place. Personally, I'm all about the variety blog, but with endless possibilities of what to write about, it can be hard to know where to start. Perhaps the most important thing, however, is to be sort-of regular about updating. Because we all need sites to check when our e-mail boxes our empty.

Don't Blog At the Expense of other writing
I found blogging to be a good way to keep my pen sharp and show off a couple of shorter pieces. But I've also noticed that sometimes the more I blog, the more erratic and sporadic my other writing projects become, which is unfortunate. Keeping a blog may feel like you're getting writing done, but it's not always easy to tell if you're making progress, or if it's just blogress.

Don't Blog At the Expense of your Life
Being out in the world, on the town, or with friends is ultimately more satisfying and will give you something to write about later.

Take it or leave it, but these are just a few things that I learned along the way. The most important one to keep in mind is to not take blogging too seriously or get sad if not that many people are commenting on your posts. The blogs that get the most hits are usually the anonymous confessions of some teenage call-girl in a faraway city, which get a million page views and a huge book deal before it's revealed that the person writing it is actually a middle-aged dude across town. Smut is hard to compete with for the public's attention, so don't even try.


I always tried to write as clearly as I could, to make it seem like there was a real person on the other end of the interface. On my better days, I felt like this guy; a display stand of sweets and a bringer of treats/smiles to help people's days along.

Other times, I didn't even know why I was blogging except to show off and call attention to myself.


But none of this matters now...

I slurp up the last of my soup and give the waiter the pre-arranged signal. He nods, walks over to the table and sets beside me a silver dish with a revolver concealed under a red silk napkin. I wave the waiter away without lifting my gaze from the table and set about eating one last fortune cookie. Only as I'm crunching on it, a bitter taste forces me to spit out the cardboard-tasting cookie and unravel the saliva-soaked fortune inside. "Stirb nicht," it reads. Do not die. I normally don't put much stock in fortunes, but the fact that it was in German struck me as profound, and I was touched enough by the cookie's life-affirming message to reconsider my bloggicidal plans...

There were many times this winter when I wanted to leave the world of blogging and never look back, but this all seemed too final, too grandiose, too self-indulgent. I didn't really want my blog to die, I just wanted to take a break from it once in a while, to give it a new name (without the increasingly inaccurate "young" in the title), and maybe relocate to a different server once I find the time.

Goethe once said of Young Werther, "I shot my hero to save myself." I had planned to do the same to Young Wetzel, but I didn't have the heart. So if you find me slumped over my table in a nice Chinese restaurant in the blogosphere, don't worry. I'm probably just taking a nap.