R is for Retrospective

Sometimes my blogging efforts feel like this.  Hope I’m helping some of you, because that’s all I desire from this blog. (Photo credit: miss_ohara)

It’s been almost a year and a half since I started blogging, and even though it has had its ups and downs, here lately I’m seeing my numbers drop off slowly and steadily.  It makes me wonder if this blogging thing is really all it’s cracked up to be.

I won’t quit.  No way.  I blog for three reasons.

1. To vent about writing.
2. To post writing tips to help fellow writers (and sometimes hash out writing problems of my own).
3. To get the creative juices flowing.

As I look back on my year and four months of blogging I realize it has been a journey.  Some of my blog posts have fallen completely flat and others like the ten writing tips gleaned from J.R.R. Tolkien’s letters still get daily hits even though I wrote it in July of 2012.  Once in a while someone will run across it who hasn’t seen it and then will tweet it and I’ll have a glorious day of over six thousand hits, but then there are days like two days ago when I had barely over 100 hits.  I’m still averaging around 150-200 hits per day, and I suppose that’s pretty good for a guy who writes as a hobby and is working with an agent who takes forever to email me back (she’s really busy and I’m trying very hard to be patient).

I’m working very diligently on my current WIP, and the A to Z blogging exercise is making me come up with blog posts each day that (try as I might) are as engaging as I can possibly make them (while grading research papers and getting students ready for what Pearson the testing company says my students should know), but I’m not taking a break.  I refuse to do that.

Blogging makes me feel useful to someone, even if it is one person who finds something useful on this blog to help them keep writing.  Hopefully some of you are getting something out of all of these tips I post all the time.

Like the homeless man said to my mother one day when she was doing something thoughtful and helpful for a bunch of them, after he had talked for nearly an hour about nonsensical things: “Thank you for listening to my dribble.”  Hopefully you will keep clicking over to this blog for more tips and tricks to help you write better.  It’s what I hope you get from this, and I hope you have a productive evening writing whatever WIP you happen to be working on.

Blessings on you, reader.  Now get back to writing.