I can never quite remember when that actual anniversary of my blog was, but apparently it was yesterday. Huzzah!
I feel like I’m letting down the blog a little this year, because I’m writing far more than usual but most of it isn’t making it here. One of my yearly goals has been to put a lot more effort into writing to work towards the point where I could potentially submit things for publication. The upside is that maybe some of that extra quality comes through in these posts, but the downside is that most of what I’m writing won’t be posted.
That said, I’ve tried a few times over the year to expose more people to this blog to get more varied perspectives on it. They have definitely been softball so far – I submitted an entry on the Godzilla subreddit for Best Essay which drove a bunch of new views, and I posted a link on AstralCodexTen’s subscriber-only open thread because I knew even if the audience there hated it, they would probably be pretty nice about it. Both went pretty well.
One of the tricky things about trying to expose this blog to traffic is subject matter. I generally write about things that interest me but in a very light manner. Those looking for controversial opinions or in-depth thinkpieces aren’t going to find them here, and people looking for consistency in topics also will be disappointed. I have some ideas on this front – I’ve had a lot of fun reading Don’t Worry About the Vase from Zvi Mowshowitz over the pandemic as he runs a weekly feature column on Covid-19. I think a weekly column on a topic I find interesting might give me a hook to grabbing other readers while not preventing me from turning the whole enterprise into a one-note operation.
One thing that makes me confident a weekly column could work without being too overwhelming is a change in my writing process. Whenever you look at trying to become a better writer, the advice always takes the form of “write more”. This is a little tricky for me since I have a full-time job that doesn’t often involve writing. By the time I get around to it in the evening I’m both exhausted and strapped for time.
What has really helped me in this regard is changing my scheduling – now I write for a block in the morning before work. I already feel more creative in the mornings anyway, and it doesn’t get in the way of any evening activities. In that time, I’ve managed to sneak in another 50,000 words of a new writing project in the first quarter of the year, which has been a lot of fun. Once April came around, I just swapped into writing posts in that time slot. It leaves me comfortable that I could get a column going if I found a good topic.
I plan on keeping the blog around for as long as I can. The neat thing about it is that I started it right as I was leaving University, which is realistically the last “chunk” of preparation before the rest of your life. The last 7 years have sort of melded together, and they certainly don’t feel almost twice as long as I was in High School for. The blog does a good job of breaking down and contextualizing that – I can see what kind of changes I was making as I grew up, since they are documented in my style and tone. It’s kind of like a time capsule.
So for longtime fans, you can expect it to stick around. It might even get more regular posts! But let’s not get our hopes up until that actually happens.
Peace out.
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