I said at the beginning of the month there would be two milestones reached on the blog during May. A couple weeks ago it saw the 20,000th view. Today, right now in fact, we reach the second one as I write this, the 500th post of What I Did on My Summer Vacation.
If you aren’t versed in blog history — as I assume most people reading this are not — I began writing this back in May of 2009 as a way to keep the writing brain exercised. For perspective, this blog has been around longer than the earliest draft of “Following Infinity,” which first came to life as a NaNoWriMo project back in November of 2009. In fact, if you scroll through the archived posts to the side and read through the ones from November and December of that year, you probably would see a few references to when I was working on it.
Writing a blog wasn’t exactly new for me when I started. I’d kept journals in high school and college, much for the same reasons I started writing Summer Vacation — to process my thinking, practice my writing, and remember what was happening in my life with greater clarity. To that end, I feel keeping this blog for the past several years has worked out pretty well. I’m not saying that every post here is a diamond, or even a diamond in the rough, but out of the now five hundred written here, there are a few I’m pretty proud of.
Of course the biggest difference between keeping a journal and keeping a blog is that the blog is technically available for anyone with an internet connection to read, so there has to be selective editing when it comes to deciding what to include, what kind of language to use here in case any students (or their parents) ever discover it, and what topics to steer away from. It makes me wonder how my relationships with some people have changed because of this, especially with people who have been reading it for a long time. I’m not saying I’m a completely open book on here, but I’ve probably revealed more about my introverted self than I’d care to contemplate. Undoubtedly there are people who either feel like they know me better, or actually do know me better, because of what I’ve written or how I’ve written it here.
I don’t know how long I’ll keep the blog going, but I have a pretty good idea about when I’ll stop. Truth be told, there was a moment a few years ago when I almost did bring it all to an end. I was looking at my fading hit count and wondering if it was worth the time to keep publishing content when only a handful of people would ever read the posts. When I reached a level of thinking of myself as an oh-so-serious Author with a Capital A, I thought it might be time to start my own author website instead, if I was ever going to establish any kind of an online platform. I ran this idea past my agent Carrie in one of our first conversations. She convinced me there would be a better time for that kind of thing later, and for the time being having a blog that I updated regularly would give anyone looking to check up on my writing something to review. So, I guess if you’re a follower, you should probably credit her as a big reason why all of this didn't disappear. With the renewed life and activity it's found in the past few years, I'm very glad it didn't.
Hopefully that author website will become necessary someday. I suspect when that happens, Summer Vacation might finally come to an end, and the blog will take on a different form if it migrates over there. For now though, after eight years and five hundred posts, keeping this still feels like enough of me that I can’t see letting it drift away anytime soon.
Lastly, a special thanks to any number of people out there who read this regularly. If I didn’t see the likes and comments and hits that show me I’m not just blathering into an electronic void, I don’t know how long I would have kept it going in the first place.
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