["Lay" and "Mark" share an IP in Uttar Pradesh, India. Spam -- and spammers -- are fair game for laughter, when they do something funny instead of merely nasty. There is no redeeming value to what they do. They are deceitful in every aspect: "Mark" used/uses fake names, he falsely asserted he was a reader of Keepa, he falsely claimed he could write anything of interest to this audience, and he cobbled together the most bizarre bit of machine-translated absurdity it has ever been my pleasure to read. So we laugh, and move on. Move on, spammer. -- AEP]

You’re certainly welcome to post links to your own work, Julia, as you have done here, *because* you are a regular commenter who is adding to the conversation when you do so. A perennial problem is people who have never participated at Keepa before, who leave a meaningless “Hey, I agree! And come read my post at …” comment — that doesn’t add to the conversation, doesn’t even demonstrate that someone actually read my post. I delete those spamilicious comments before they appear publicly.

Building an audience is hard,and depends on a lot of factors, some of which are out of your control. I don’t have any magic answer. I hope some Keepa readers do check out your blog — always available through the link in your name whenever you leave a comment (in case some readers don’t realize that). The connection between our subjects may not be as strong as it seems on the surface, though — I post old LDS literature because it is part of our past, not because it necessarily merits being remembered for its literary qualities. Enjoying the historical flavor of an old story or poem might not necessarily translate directly into wanting to discuss literature as literature.

I admit I often feel like I am thrashing around trying to figure out how to connect into a writing community that is both familiar and strange. I have had everything from a request for my complete resume, when I submitted a poem, to a request for an entire piece before they would even let me know if the topic was of interest. I have had several requests to write, and then gotten the “edited” version that was obviously not originally written by me. (In fact, in one case it was a completely different topic. After writing back that I thought there had been a mistake, I never heard from them again.)

Personally, I share the links to posts that get me started writing about a topic, and I enjoy having guest posts because they bring different views. I do edit them some, but usually it is spelling, grammar and smoothing a few run on sentences or taking repetitive statements and combining a paragraph or two.

It is timely right now because I know I will be having surgery soon, and put out an official request for submissions. (I want to be able to have several weeks of, at least 2-3 posts a week, during the initial recovery period) and thought it would be nice to have several fairly broad topic series as a place to start. anyone who has been there knows my blog is pretty eclectic, and has biews and topics that are wide ranging. So far I am not important enough to get these kinds of requests, but I did get a few emailed responses to “taking them off my spam mailing list.” I sent out a request to bloggers who I read and comment on their blogs regularly, (not just random bloggers) but it seems some people took it as less than a sincere request.

(For a shameless plug, about my shameless love of Keepa, you can see today’s post, http://www.poetrysansonions.com/2012/12/grace-is-house-that-ardis-built.html?m=0)

So, any brilliant insights on what I can do better, or avoid, in trying to make connections with other bloggers?

I only wish you had asked for a piece on the Steampunk Mormons…I’ve always wondered about those guys.