And here we are finally at the end of this experiment. I’ve always wondered if publishing posts more frequently would change anything about readership and thought this month would be a good test case for that. Turns out it was, but just not with the trend I’d hoped to see. Oh well. Woe is me and all. I haven’t lost any Facebook friends during the month so at least it doesn’t seem like I’ve offended anyone. That must count for something.
So was it worth the effort? I honestly don’t know. The audience didn’t build, and sure, audience is important. I thought more posts could lead to more people reading or maybe even me getting into enough of a flow to write something people would find share-worthy, but that didn’t happen. Like I’ve said before, I don’t write something and hope I’m the only person who will ever read it. Musicians want to be heard, artists want to be viewed, writers want to be read. Writing doesn’t come to life until someone else reads it and reacts to it. And to generalize, the more people reached the more life the writing has. At least from a perspective.
But collecting Likes and Comments and Hits isn’t the reason for doing all of this. The real goal, whether I ever stated it or not, was to get myself back into a habit of writing every day in preparation for the summer. I have high ambitions about what I’d like to do with my break this year, and with only one more week until I’m there I do feel I’m a lot more ready to get to work than I did a month ago. So in that sense all of this was very much worth the effort, and I’m glad I put in the mileage to get where I am. Now it’s all about the next step.
If you’ve stuck with me this far, you might be interested in the statistics for the month. Going back to my first post on May 1 and up through this one:
I wrote a little more than 28,000 words on the blog this month, which roughly translates into about 95 double-spaced pages. It had taken me the previous year to publish as many posts as I have in May. I collected a total of 72 Facebook comments (not including the few response comments I made) and, oddly enough, 72 likes. Many of the likes and comments kept coming from the same people, and to those people, thank you for reading -- I hope you haven’t learned too many things about me this month that make you wish you could run and hide and forget.
So as you can tell, I’ve been kind of busy. And my eyes are both tired and burning with a little residual sunblock after a day spent monitoring the dunk tank at Track and Field Day. And it’s a Friday night. So, if you don’t mind I think I am going to drop off the face of the Earth for awhile. I’ll be back here when I’ve got something else to say that seems like a good fit. It could be in a few days or a few weeks, but sooner or later I’ll be back. I just gotta rest up a bit first. And of course, June starts tomorrow. Which means I have just a little over three hours to think of what my next monthly goal is going to be....
