Sunday Salon: Toes wet

Good morning Sunday Salon,

                New to the waters of the Facebook group, Sunday Salon, I am wading –getting my toes wet.  I admire the ease with which others engage in casual book talk in the Salon, and find I am often more comfortable writing something a little more formal – not quite a full essay but a little more than conversation with friends. So I’m trying something a little more chatty.
               I am slow and getting slower it seems. It has taken me a little more than six months to figure out how to find blogs I like to read and I still don’t have it down.  Apart from loyal friends, family and a handful of new acquaintances, I haven’t a clue as to who reads mine. Audience. How do you know who your readers are? And how does that shape your writing?  It all seems so random.
               Years ago, I read a farewell letter from the publisher and founder of a great, issues-driven alternative newspaper. He was leaving the paper, he said, because he no longer knew who his readers were. That made sense to me. One of the first rules of writing, I had been taught, was know your audience.
                But when I began blogging I told myself audience didn’t matter. I would just write and see what happened. That hasn’t quite worked either. I’m still confused and tentative. It doesn’t help that on many days my stats tell me I have more hits from the Netherlands than from the U.S. Maybe it’s all the Nordic Noir I have been writing about.

     Last week I struggled with my writing. I completed a piece on Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, a book I very much liked.  I also finished Julian Barnes The Sense of An Ending, another great book that will likely take me some time to think and write about, my self-imposed assignment for this week. 
              So given that labor, I decided to switch from literary fiction, back to more page-turning Nordic Noir. I’ve just begun Jussi Adler-Olsen’s The Keeper of Lost Causes.