One of the blogs I read is another off the grid site. Off grid Islander. I read several OTG blogs actually. I find them all interesting. But, like mine, they do not strictly adhere to just off the grid topics. OTG Islander kinda wanders around their remote community (another island – don’t know which one) and talks about personal health issues and visitors and shopping and other somewhat prosaic topics but the author has a good style, each blog is short and she addresses issues I can relate to. It feels like neighbourliness if not friendship.
But now she thinks she is boring so she is going to quit. “I have been writing about our adjustments getting off the grid for four years and I have covered much of what I had to say so…….goodbye.”
That is embarrassing for me. I have been writing my blog for over six years. I am guessing maybe as long as 8. I know that I have become more boring as time went on but my writing has also improved somewhat and so there was some compensation in that. I hope. I am getting increasingly more dull but I convey it better. I think. I was not YET going to say, ‘goodbye’.
Whatever…
I mention all this because writing, for me, was just something I wanted to be able to do better. And, while Attwood and Angelou do not have to check over their shoulders, I have become somewhat better and so I, too, can also NOW quit. Or, at least I can think about it.
What exactly is the point anymore? (feel free to chime in….)
Well, part of the point is just what I felt when the other OTG author quit. It is not so much the news she was imparting that attracted me to her blog, it was the niche ‘community’ we all belonged to. And I am assuming I have a small (but more deviant) community, too. I doubt that anyone reads me from which to learn anything; they read me to ‘stay’ in touch, to remain friends, to be part of something ever-so-slightly larger.
If I quit, their knowledge of OTG life will not likely vary one whit. There are tons of books and blogs out there. If it’s all about OTG for them, they can keep on going on better paved paths than the one I am working on. But their connection to this blog will be a small loss of some kind. Something personal, I should think. Just as her quitting was a small personal loss for me.
Another reason for continuing is that OTG’ers are NOT as isolated as they were even just a few decades before. With modern communications, internet and such, we can still have a foot in the larger community (the grid) and comment on it from a near but unique perspective. Our view of things may be deemed somewhat crazy to a condo dweller in the west end but it comes from a different place and we see things a different way. Crazy or not, it’s different.
I think she is also right to assume that gardens and eagles and seals and storms are no longer really good fodder for too many more blogs. Especially for long time readers. But, if there is something really interesting happening out here in the natural world, most people would still like to know about it. And, if we build something or fall down another flight of stairs or set ourselves on fire, most readers feel enough of a vested interest that it at least makes for interesting reading. It may be dull but it is OUR dull.
So, I get it. I know what she is feeling. I resist that feeling as much as I can. But I get it. I get close to ‘ending it all’ now and then, too. But I am still here. And I think I know the main reason why…………
Knowing that I have readers allows me to write a book. A second one, in fact. Having readers allowed me to write the first one. And maybe there will be a third. Like Dumbo had a feather, I have a clutch of readers I can cling to for confidence. It’s pathetic, I guess, but really, blog readers are a kind of test market. If you can write something and someone will read it, then that someone might read the next thing, too.
And the next thing is another book.
As most of you know, book 2 is in the works. It is not really all that new or great. I am shooting for mediocre again. And it’s not because I have underdeveloped aspirations. I would like fame and riches and groupies, I am sure. For a week, anyway. Maybe two. Depends on the groupies, really. But book 2 is really just the fill-in that we dropped out of book one. Book-two is literary Spackle. Gap-filler. Bondo.
The critics bemoaned the fact that there was nothing really in book one that told them what to do – just what NOT to do! Book one was basically just a litany of foolish acts. Book two will not be a list of how ‘to do it right’ type instructions either (because we don’t know how to do stuff right) but it will fill in some of the basic questions raised by the critics. Once that is done, we can move on to yet another book, the third one.
The third one will be different.
Maybe not even OTG at all…?
Our Off the Grid Home 
I think the original reason for your blog (OTG) was what made me check out the site.
That being said. The political and economic (current events) discussions are just as interesting as the OTG tidbits of info.
Unless you’re supremely bored, busy or both. Why quit? I dare say for every commenter on the blog there are probably 10 that just read without commenting.
Especially when I see other blogs with a poltical commentary being hacked and knocked to their knees (Laila Yulie’s blog down for several days now).
We need more intelligent, critical, humourous blogs now more than ever
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Appreciated. But we need more intelligent, critical and humorous commentators, too. It is the readers’s responses that keeps the writer writing. By the way, I hope you don’t mind that I offer up only two of the three necessary criteria?
Wish I had a back door to the Anonymous group. I would sic ’em on whoever hacks LYuile.
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I am going to miss Off The Grid Living. I enjoyed reading about her gardening and water supplies, hauling stuff, health issues and health successes and seeing the short videos she posted of action in the water.
Dave and Sally, I love reading about your water stories, building adventures, hauling, travelling, relaxing, happiness, and hard work too.
Hugs.
Joy
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NOT your OFF The Grid Living, the sweet lady who is stopping blogging Off the Grid Islander. Whoops.
Joy
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Hold your horses Big Guy. A little perspective here. Did you not spend most of the winter there! Speculation here, need some R & R? Spend a little time in town is the cure. The contrast will have you happily heading back OTG. I may be wrong but the lady moving to town isn’t it a health issue? Don’t know really just guessing. I think OTG fits you well.
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Oh yeah. OTG is the ONLY place for me now, really. I wouldn’t fit in anymore. Probably get tasered within a week if I tried urban again. Definitely ticketed. Taxed. Bored. Irritated. No point in returning. Not for me. BUT not for the Island lady, either. She’s staying. Jus’ not writin’.
Yes, we did ‘winter’ here and it was good. Very good, really, but winter is still winter and so NEXT winter will be ‘snowbirded’ for a bit. We’ll go south. NOT long. But we will take a break.
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Now, now. Not the only place. Must be lots of places that would engender that sense of well being you currently enjoy. Remember what Dorothy said, “There is no place like home.”
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You may be right and I DO feel as if HERE is home. That is part of the magic for me – no other place quite felt like home before. NOT ever. THIS does. So, I am a bit more of a home-body here than I ever thought possible about myself. HERE is home and HERE is where I wanna be.
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Off Grid Islander here… Thanks for the nice comments..To be clear.. I’m pulling the plug on the blog..not the life.. We aren’t going anywhere… Or at least until they drag my cold dead body off the cliff in forty years… I will still keep my journal and record our life but it’s just going to be for me for a while…. Nice to know I will be missed … A little….. Take care….
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Last winter I noticed a lot of views on my blog coming from Russia… Then one day my friends started getting spam mail from me…. I disovered “he” had taken over the blog account and created a fake new home email…I had to hack that email and take it back.. It was all kind of crazy..Why someone in Russia would want to bother with my small time blog I could not fathom……live and learn… I put in a double secret super special convoluted password and chalked it up to wierd….
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Me, too. The greatest number of ‘readers’ are Chinese and Russian. Makes no sense unless they are internet robots looking to find data files containing numbers and such. That’s why I am pretty sure my readership is 6 or 7. On the other hand, maybe Sergei, Yuri and Chang are hoping to go OTG some day? I wouldn’t blame them.
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I, for one , hope you go on writing
Indefinitely . The blog has become
More than a forum on OTG. I view it
As a wide ranging philosophical discussion peppered with a great
Sense of humor.
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Thanks, Gerry. Especially for encouragement to stray off the OTG theme. I want to rant on about other things, too. It’s cathartic. Helps keep the black bile under control. Having said that, there is plenty of material OTG still. But I admit that there is more as the weather improves. And, it is. We have had several days now, for instance, on solar panels alone. NO genset. NOT EVEN for a minute. I can weld, fer Gawd’s sake!
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Well, get on with it! I lent my copy of the first book out to I don’t remember whom and I’m reluctant to purchase another in case I get it back. I will commit to purchasing one of the second and third books, it that will provide an impetus to proceed.
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Thanks, JG. And I will hold you to purchase of #3 (if we get there) but #2 is just gap-filler. No obligation whatsoever. None. I just had to ‘finish’ what I intended to say the first time.
We are half way through. Sal is editing and changing and demanding re-writes and basically being a pain-in-the-publication. But that is what made the 1st one somewhat readable so I am just doing as I am told right now. I’ll go back to wearing the pants in the family when she says I can.
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Just back from a long break for R&R to watch college softball and baseball followed by a week up the lake with no Internet. Sorry to hear a blogger is quitting even before I knew about her. I’ll take a chance and follow her anyway. – Margy
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