Yesterday this blog got something like 800+ views, which is something like 2.5 times my next most-trafficked post. It got retweeted a fair amount, but most of the views were from Facebook, so perhaps some writer-type people shared it? I guess people really were looking for advice on which writing manuals do not suck. Kind of funny. I’d definitely heard about this sort of thing–an article spreading beyond a blog’s immediate readership–but it’d never really happened to me before. I think that part of it is that I haven’t been as active on social networks until this year, really. Nowadays I’m making more of an effort to, like, do the tweeting and such, which at least puts me in a place where it is capable of being noticed by people.
Still, it’s very interesting. Part of me is, like, “Oh god! I have already used up my one article idea that was of general interest! And it wasn’t even my idea: a follower (whose name I do not know and who I have never met in real life) tweeted the idea to me yesterday morning! I am bereft! My idea box is bankrupt!”
But, intellectually, I know that’s not true. I will have other awesome ideas. This blog’s been evolving for some five years now, and I constantly feel like I’m only just figuring out what I should write about and how I should write about it. Sometimes I read other blogs, and the writing seems so crisp and witty and assured. And that’s not me. My blogging is kind of chatty and slack and it often refuses to coalesce into a nice conclusion. But there is something developing. And I am sure it will only continue to develop.
Anyway, 2013 has been a good year for blogging! I was feeling somewhat depressed for much of it, which actually led to some pretty good posts. This is actually the 3rd or 4th time this year that the blog has set a new record for most-visited day. Anyway, nowadays I’m feeling way, way better. Even though it is 7:30 AM and I am really tired (only got 5 hours of sleep last night) and I kind of hate life, I also don’t really hate life. I love life. Life is the best. Someday in the future, I am sure I will once again feel terrible, so I’d better enjoy this while it lasts!
Sometimes I get this strange sense of destiny, like everything is moving closer at this incredibly slow but utterly inexorable pace. In my life, it always feels like nothing is happening, but when I look back even six months (or even three!), I can see that everything used to be completely different. I mean, three months ago, I was still trying to revise that terrible novel. Now I’m trying to revise an entirely different, but much better, novel. Three months ago, my most-visited day involved some 150 views. Now it’s 800 views. It’s all so slow and, in some ways, so minor. But still stunning to me that so much could’ve happened in so little time. And I just think, wow, I have so many trimesters left in my life. At least, I dunno…a hundred? Two hundred? To me, that involves an amount of change that is simply incomprehensible.