Daniel J. Peterson

This is my first blog. This may be a strange thing for someone of my generation to admit, but it’s true nonetheless. I missed out on the Livejournal craze back in high school (though I’m glad to see George R.R. Martin keeping that platform alive), never had a Myspace page, and have never posted anything all that lengthy on Facebook. I’ve certainly never started my own website with the intention of making it a blog before. So, what I’m saying is, when I decided that it was time for me to update my old free University of Michigan webpage and that a blog ought to be part of my updated website, I had no experience to guide me in shaping my conception of what my blog ought to be.

So, for the past week, I’ve been contemplating a number of questions about this blog. What am I supposed to write here? How often should I write it? Who’s my audience? And, most importantly, what is the purpose of this blog? And while all the answers I’ve come up with are subject to change with time, here’s what I’ve got so far:

• The purpose of this blog is to update interested parties (including my friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter) about what’s going on with my various projects and to provide short contributions to topics in my areas of interest (e.g. philosophy, science fiction, education, and writing in general) that allow me to engage with others interested in these topics. What this means is that most blog posts will probably mark milestones (big events in the life of Mind Bubble, for instance, or the publication or acceptance for publication of some piece of writing I’ve submitted to a journal or magazine), but I also reserve the right to test out an idea for a paper I’ve been mulling over or provide my thoughts on whatever I’ve been reading.
• My audience includes anyone who’s interested in reading what I’ve written. I’ll generally assume an audience knowledgeable in whatever it is I’m ranting about, but I am always happy to provide background if a reader’s interested.
• I will update the blog sporadically and only when I have something worth posting in line with the blog’s statement of purpose. No posts on a specific timeframe. No posts just for the sake of posting something. So I likely won’t be posting here all that frequently, and the easiest way to keep up with me, rather than just checking back at this site from time to time, would be to connect on social media.

So that’s where I am at the moment. We’ll see how it works out for me over the coming months.