People Like Mean Stuff

When thinking about the past week and looking at my blog statistics, I feel another surge of ick. It's sad that the only post I've written in four years of blogging that has received any sort of major attention is the one post where I deviated from my normal, nice, hilarious self and had a really shitty moment. What does that say about people? I think what it says about me is that I am a human being. Did you guys know this? I am double-checking because I'm not sure everyone out there thinks authors are human. Like we are assumed to be thick-skinned animals like, say, actors and celebrities, just because we put our work out there. But we are very different from celebrities in that our work is pretty much our work. Actors are part of a huge machine: they're in a movie that someone else generally wrote, directed, edited, produced, marketed, etc., along with a whole bunch of other actors. As an author, we do get an editor to help guide our work, and we do get publicity (coughwouldlovetonsmorecough), but we (99.999% of us) don't sit around with hundreds of people to churn out a book. And our numbers are much different than celebrities for most authors, as well. We don't sell millions of books, we don't make millions of dollars, and we generally don't reach the numbers of people that celebrities reach. Not that they deserve more public scrutiny than authors, but perhaps that's why it makes more sense that they deal with far more criticism, being so much more out in the world than authors. If only authors had the same opportunities to wear glamorous gowns and be courted by designers. Dare to dream.

So you know what happened last week? (For those who have no idea what I'm talking about: a blogger wrote a bad review of my book, and I wrote a nasty blog post in return. Then I got about 100 comments, some supporting me, most not, and people ran with it. It was ugly.) People finally read my blog. For all the wrong reasons. That eats me up. Why, when I post a sincere blog about breastfeeding, do I get a handful of responses? Or when I write a hilarious post about lying in a tweet just to receive a re-tweet from a star obsession? Or when I post awesome pictures of my Barbies from high school? People on the internet, apparently, prefer their news bad, their comments worse. Blech. My most-read post? This one, about how I love Ke$ha. Sounds happy enough, right? Except when I looked into my blog's stats to see what search terms were used to connect readers to my blog, the ones that came up most were "Ke$ha" and "ugly." Damn, people. You are seriously searching the internet for ugly pictures of Ke$ha? And here we are, back full circle to the celebrity scrutiny. I hope someday I earn the kind of money that makes getting torn apart worth it. Or at the very least, it somehow leads me to Ke$ha. Hey girl.