Why Blog?

There's a good chance some new people will be stopping by my blog in the next few days as Rachael Harrie's Fourth Platform-Building Writers' Campaign gears up. Since most of those people will be writers with blogs of their own, this seems like a great time to discuss why I blog and get to hear the input of readers about why they blog.

First off all, let's talk about a reason which is not part of my rationale for blogging. For me -- and probably most of you as well -- it's not about making money directly from advertising or anything of that sort. I don't run any ads here and my little Amazon search box has led to exactly one purchase in the lifetime of the blog. So, yeah, not a moneymaker. And that's just fine.

Here are the three main reasons I do blog:

1. For the socialization. Getting to meet and talk things over with other writers has had multiple benefits. For one, I've learned from them. A second benefit is that it's been fun getting to know a lot of other writers. The biggest benefit for me, though, has been having a community that I can chat with when I'm feeling good or bad about my writing and a set of people that I've traded critiques with where hopefully all of the parties involved have gotten useful feedback on their work.
2. Producing blog posts regularly forces me to be introspective about my writing and organize my thoughts on writing.  A large number of the posts that I end up writing here come directly from my own attempts to sort out how I feel about one writing topic or another. The Dissecting the Short Story series (currently on hiatus) was one example of this, where I would try to see what I could learn from stories published by pro-rate fiction markets. But I've also written about dealing with stress, planning for novel revisions, etc.
3. As an additional writing-related creative outlet for days when trying to write fiction isn't working well for me. If you've followed this blog regularly in the past, you know that I've written 500 words or more every day for over five months. One of the things that's been a bit part of my success at keeping that writing streak alive is not absolutely having to write fiction every day. Some days I either don't have a fiction work in progress or -- more common -- the ones I do have aren't ones that I feel ready to move on with quite yet. Those days, having the option of putting some writing energy into a blog post and keeping myself moving forward in general with writing has been hugely positive for me.

I'm sure I could come up with some other good reasons to blog, but those are the three most prominent for me. What about you -- why do you blog?