Connections

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This whole blogging thing is still very new to me, at least from a blogger's perspective, and I'm very much the kid in a toy store - pushing all the buttons, and listening to the funny new beeps. I'm discovering things that I guess everyone else has known forever.

Something struck me this week that made that little light bulb pop up - the one you usually see over the heads of cartoon characters.

A blogger whose name I didn't recognize had added me to his blogroll and that, in turn, led someone else my way. The ever-watchful eye of Sitemeter helped me figure that out. I visited a new blog, found some cool stuff, and made a new connection. And who knows what that might lead me to?

It rang in my rather thickly-padded head that that is what blogging is really about - reaching people who we, as ordinary dufuses, never could in any other way.

And just as I was thinking about that, something else came in over the transom - an e-mail from a newly-minted author who's promoting her new book by speaking at the Berkeley Yacht Club this Friday night.

She's Janna Cawrse Esarey, whose “The Motion of the Ocean” tells of her two-year cruise around the Pacific, but is really more about the stormy relationship with her hubby both before and during the cruise.

That interests me because I intend to blog quite a bit here about how trying to keep my wife happy has influenced many of the decisions I've made about sailing over the years.

Janna also discusses her battle to get her story published - something that may interest other writing sailors or sailing bloggers trying to take it to another level. I think she's been rather successful. Either her two cats are named Simon and Schuster, or she's scored with a major publisher.

And so, because of this blog, yet another connection has been made in my life.

I'm starting to feel like James Burke.

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