Today is the first in another month of daily consecutive blog posts I’ll be writing throughout May. However, it’s very possible it will be the last time I do this.
I didn’t write anything during Nanowrimo this past November, after doing it more years than not since, I believe, 2008. I doubt I’ll participate again, since the question as to whether or not I can write a 50,000-word manuscript in thirty days has been answered repeatedly.
This past December I wrote another series of daily posts with accompanying photos to tell an annual holiday story about Cinnamon, the demented Elf on a Shelf that has plagued me for the past five years. I doubt that will happen again, either. This year’s story ended in a way I felt was conclusive, and I don’t think there’s anything more to say.
This blog, “What I Did on My Summer Vacation,” is ten years old this month. The reason I started it was to give myself a way to practice writing outside of a narrative structure. Back then I was picking away at one manuscript at a time when I felt inspired or found it convenient; this lackadaisical approach kept me from being as prolific as I probably should have been, so blogging seemed like a good occasional mental workout for those less active writing periods.
It’s a decade later, and things are different now. I have this blog to write, I contribute to another blog about children’s literature, and I have an agent to work with. Having an agent doesn’t mean everything about developing a writing career happens at an electric pace, but it does require more time and more intentional focus than I’d been putting forth before. If you want to get the work done, Rule Number One is you gotta show up to do it.
So, because of all that’s changed over these ten years, I’m undecided about the future of this blog.
I’ve almost shut it down before. In fact, I was weeks away from letting it disappear when I signed with my agent, until she convinced me it would be better to keep it as some kind of minimal online presence as a writer platform. Lately the key word there has been “minimal,” since I’ve only published a handful of posts this year leading up to this annual May surge. This lack of activity comes from the time and creative energy demands of other writing projects (it’s been my experience that creative energy is often a finite resource) as well as a simple lack of things to say. Posting regular content would be a great thing for a blog, but if that regular content amounts to regular episodes of boring, there isn’t much point.
Eventually Summer Vacation, like so many actual summer vacations, is going to end. The day will come when I have a book (or books!) to sell, and I’ll be recreating my online platform as an author web page instead of just a blog. Once that happens, I don’t see this continuing. But that's still in the future. After the month ends, we’ll see what kind of form it’s going to take. I have some ideas, but a lot can change in a month. But for now, I still have the challenge in front of me to go another full month with different posts for each of the thirty-one days.
Except I am planning to cheat a little at the end of the month. Even though I’m posting every day, it won’t all be new content this year. As we get closer to the end of the month, I’m going to dig up and repost some of my favorite older posts, including a few that maybe didn’t have the audience I’d hoped for at the time, to mark the 10th anniversary. It’s also worth mentioning that if this May turns out to be like any of the previous Mays I’ve done this, my hit count will reach 30,000 page views at some point. To commemorate that benchmark, I’ll make the same offer here I made a few years ago: If anyone notices they turn out to be the page view that hits that mark, they should let me know it was them and I will honor some kind of writing-related request that the two of us can work out.
All right then. Let’s see where this month takes us.
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