Sushmita’s been a fan of my blog for a year or two, which is an Ice Age in Internet time. We’ve never met in person and probably aren’t likely to anytime soon. She lives in Bombay, and my days of flying across the planet to meet online friends are D-U-N DONE.

But the fact that Sushmita reads regularly and is not in my life means a lot to me … I figure my friends check in on this from time to time because they know and like me, but her comments and continued reading mean to me that this frustrating labor of love is good enough for complete strangers, too. And to someone that’s as vain and insecure as I can be, the Sushmitas of the world mean a whole, whole lot.

She sent me a really nice note about the blog’s new incarnation … after the jump:

Really like the new blog. You’re right, it’s a lot more professional. A lot more posts and extremely readable posts, at that. I’ve always liked the way you write.

Thing is though, I miss the old blog. What it had going for it was a lack of professionalism and that translated itself into a sense of intimacy. A certain kind of casual. There have been a quite a few times that I’ve read something and gone, ‘Ah, I know what that feels like’ or ‘What must that be like’. Now it feels like reading a magazine, crammed with interesting stuff, one that I would definitely pick up, anyway.

I think the shift has mainly been from your opinion to a more neutral kind of perspective. And I don’t know how that makes a difference, if at all. or if I am just reacting to the ‘change’. But I guess, I’ll figure that out by and by. Good luck with the new blog, though.

I hadn’t planned on the intimacy of this thing vanishing — and I wouldn’t say that it’s happened yet.

There is this certain sort of insect whose name I’ve forgotten. But it eats ants, voraciously. Ant soldiers can prevent this insect from entering the hive if they have fair warning, but this insect has evolved an incredible trick around it: its body is covered in long, sharp spines. It lies in wait a ways away from an ant colony and waits for lonely scouts to pass. It then grabs those scouts and impales them, wriggling, onto its spines. After it decorates itself with a few dead ants, it carries the pheromonal imprint of the ant colony. It walks right past the gatekeepers, past the soldiers and scouts, down, down, and starts eating right at the colony’s heart.

I can’t think of a better metaphor for blogging. To appropriate Hunter S. Thompson’s words, blogging is “a cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs.” It’s mathematical strategy and petty politicking in a world populated by passionate people stuck on their asses, draping yourself in the right dead ants to get down into the dark heart and suckle sweet nectar from the blind queen’s twitching teats.

So there’s that. And the ants I’m draping my self in, they’re my real interests – comics, robots, sci-fi, art, all that stuff. I learned a few things in my professional career as a blogger and from my big fat break this summer:

1) Using your words to get truly, totally naked online is potentially one of the most liberating and immediately fulfilling experiences a human can have.

2) It’s also difficult and exhausting — and there’s only so much of it you can do in a week.

3) To really build traffic and hold an audience, you’ve got to post every day, if not multiple times a day. It’s actually good to point, reference, and promote without actually creating.

Maybe it’s like really, really good sex. There’s all different kinds of it: fun, light, heavy, communicative, intense, quick hits. And the only way it can mean the most is when the pressure’s off and it doesn’t have to mean anything at all.

The intimacy’s not gone. Far from it — there’s just more going on now, more reliably, and hopefully it’s even more fun. Thanks for sticking with me.