The challenge all personal weblogs face is, invariably, keeping an audience interested. There are ostensibly two ways to do this. The first is to lead an extraordinarily exciting life; the second is to provide enough insight into the mundane as to make your account of the day to day events in your life worth reading. Apart from a semester spent studying in Rome, or a having a hurricane pass through her district in 2003, or getting married and having a son at the tender age of 20, Ashley Sisson’s life is not exactly terribly fascinating. After ploughing through almost 200 entries spread over just over 2 years, I regretfully have to conclude that she’s not particularly insightful, either.
Before I come across as being overly presumptuous, I’d like to state that, above all, weblogs, especially those being reviewed here, should hold some appeal for a larger audience. Therein lies the problem with this particular weblog. Ashley’s account of her college life focuses mainly on classes she takes, grades she receives for them, and random musings about her boyfriend. Eventually, she dumps said boyfriend (Aaron), gets with a new boyfriend (JD), becomes pregnant, and gets married. She stops going to school, and decides to work in a hotel in Victoria, Texas. Throughout all these recollections, she references characters we have no connection to, or interest in.
Ashley’s description of her friends is brief and cursory, so we never really get a feeling for these peripheral characters in her life, and, at the same time, never really become attached to any of them. It seems, therefore, that this weblog is much like any other personal weblog out there – something which only interests people who already have some vested interest in the characters represented.
That being said, Ashley is by no means a bad writer. She conveys her thoughts and emotions competently – the reader who perseveres in going through all her entries will definitely come out with a sense that he or she knows this character, this english song bird. However, as Ashley says on November 25th, 2003, about a short story she wrote, ‘I wouldn’t read all of that unless I had to grade it.’
Indeed, Ashley, indeed.sitdiary The Shadowlands