I know, logic should tell me that I don't have readership because people don't know my blog exists. But let me run with this.
But then my bemoaning got me thinking: who IS my target audience? Why write a blog if I don't have a target audience? If this is for my own sake, why wouldn't I just go back to writing in a journal? Should I be more intentional about sticking with my target audience?
So of course my target audience is Knitters. Look at the name of my blog.
But I don't always write about knitting, because knitting isn't the only thing that inspires me to write.
As an aside, I haven't been knitting lately. I knit a lot at the end of last year and the start of this year, and it was wonderful. I got a heady sense of accomplishment and I felt a positively euphoric sense of pride in sharing my finished objects. But then I stopped knitting, after the cream zippy cardigan fiasco, and I just haven't picked up the needles in a while. I was inspired to start a particularly lofty project, but I haven't had the extra cash for the yarn and needles yet.
But anyway. I write on other topics. For example, I could go for pages on Diablo 3 (yes, I did buy the game, after playing the free beta test that Blizzard Entertainment opened up one weekend). I shared with you that I have a longtime love-love relationship with video and computer games. How could I resist?
However, I am not a gamer. I couldn't claim to own that illustrious title. Don't ask me questions about any other recent computer games because I only have enough gaming knowledge to communicate fluently with gamers.
So I couldn't even make this a niche blog targeted at knitter-gamers. In fact, if I had to identify myself at all with any one sub-culture, I couldn't do it. Let me give you an example:
When I was in high school, I aspired to attain the level of first-chair oboist. However, when my band director found out I had tried out for and made varsity cheerleading, he assumed band would take the back seat and didn't even offer me an audition for regionals, an experience that would have primed me for first-chair when the senior holding the position graduated that year. I just didn't see how my choice to cheerlead could create a conflict with band. Unintentional defiance of two of the strongest high school stereotypes there are. I did it by accident 15 years before Glee.
Need more? I have played the following albums on neverending repeat in my lifetime:
Hanson's Middle of Nowhere
Tool's 10,000 Days
Billy Joel's Innocent Man
The only commonality here is that I seem to prefer male vocalists.
I had a quarter-year crisis when I finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, because I knew Harry was a horcrux and had to die even before J.K. Rowling announced the release date of the last book. I could have written a thesis of literary analysis as well as personal opinion of that series because I lived and breathed it. I dreamed it. I absorbed myself in the universe; so much so that if you wanted to know, I could tell you the spell to turn a light on-and-off or that in the movie version of HPHBP, young James uses the wrong spell to flip Snape upside down. I'll stop there. Trust me, I'm a bit of a fanatic.
I profess to be a born-again Christian, but I believe in same-sex marriage, evolution and premarital sex. In fact, if I could change one thing about my life I would have had more sex before I met my husband.
Also on the topic of sex (but only as a tangential segue) I write about motherhood. At least, I WILL write about motherhood, when I am a mother, but until then I will write about how I want to be a mom. But what MOM wants to read a blog about motherhood written by a woman who is NOT a mom? Ok, besides my own. And what non-mother wants to read about how someone wants desperately to BE a mother?
And there are the myriad of topics I make allusions to: literature, French grammar, music, movies, business ... each of these, if expanded upon, I imagine could serve as a popular stand-alone topic. Because there are groups of people who identify themselves as lovers/appreciators of, experts on, at least mildly interested in each of these items. Yes, even French grammar.
But when you reference them all in one spot, in varying degrees of detail, you lose people. Because no one is interested in the exact combination of randomness that I am. If I begin a rant on why women haven't gotten as far as popular media would like us to believe, you might yawn and press the upper right-hand "x". Just the other day I had an amazing epiphany about why women in business should be allowed to take their newborns to work. But you're here for the knitting patterns, tips and inspiration, so why would you care?
My identity is so obscure, I have a category of one (that wasn't a reference to the book).
How does a chameleon know what color it is?
Mrs. Pi
