What the hell am I doing? I’m taking the first step into a whole new experience. As anyone who knows me can tell you, I have a lot to say about this whole opera thing, and I never really hold back, forcing everybody in my path to listen. I guess that means I shouldn’t call expressing my thoughts on our business a “whole new experience,” but here I am putting those thoughts down on digital paper and sending them out into the blogosphere for all to read. Why am I doing this? A few months ago, I posted a lengthy note on Facebook about my decision to get in shape and change my life completely. Well, I had no idea that note would be passed around to so many people, but the next thing I new, I had comments coming in from all over, both friends and strangers alike. These comments were expressing support, agreement, thanks, and from some people, asking for more. When people told me I should write more posts, my initial reaction was that it was a bad idea. I don’t want to fall to the temptation to use the internet as a hotheaded place to express my anger about the things I don’t like in our business. Not to mention, I’m not a writer, so why should I think I have the skills to repeatedly produce content people would actually want to read? I decided against the blog. Oh well, here I am a few months later, and the idea has been nagging at me in the back of my mind, so I’ve decided to take a leap and see what happens.
So, what the hell am I doing? There are lots of people out there talking about our business in various forms of media. I love them all, from columns, to blogs, to podcasts. I consume them all voraciously, but I want more from the discussion. There are so many things we could bring into our opera conversation that nobody ever talks about, and that’s what I want to do. I want to dive deep. I want to find out what our collective fears, pressures, anxieties, passions, failures, and successes have to say about us as a community. And the best way I feel I can start a conversation about all these difficult things is to share publicly myself. Sometimes all it takes is a catalyst, and if there are people out there who want to talk, I want to try and get things started.
That being said, I’m not going to just write a bunch of gloom and doom. My topics will vary from serious to ridiculous. Some posts will be long, others will be short. I have no idea how frequently they will appear. I’m not going to tie myself down to deadlines, since I only want to write when I actually have something important to say, thereby maintaining some kind of quality. Basically, this is my show, and I get to do it however I want.
Although, I do want your help. I will leave a comment section on every blog post, and I will not censor posts from readers. Obviously, if you write hateful things to other readers, that will not be tolerated, but feel free to let me have it. I want your advice, I want your questions, and I definitely want topic ideas. I’m making my own list of course, but I would love it if we could get into what you as a community are thinking about as well.
So, the first real post should be up this week, if I can get over my crippling fear of being criticised and just do it. Please read, share, subscribe, tell your friends, and let me know what you think. We have to be there for each other, and it’s time to ask each other some tough questions.
Why blog?
Why not?