Blogging

I began blogging in January, 2003, so I am coming up on 7 years. I have about 100 visitors a day, which has been steady for some time, dipping to 70 or so, climbing to 120 or so, maybe a quarter of the daily visitors coming back for more than one visit on the same day. These figures sound pretty large to me. Certainly they are more than I expected when I started.

Originally I saw my audience as younger writers curious about "the writing life" and so visiting a writer's blog the way I, as a young writer, read collections of letters to get a sense of the personal day-to-day life of various writers. Now and again I get an email telling me I've succeeded with a young writer in this regard.

I've been at this long enough that I catch myself repeating myself, telling the same old story again. Old men do that a lot.

I sense my relationship to this blog is changing, however. I already have a posthumous blog that serves more as a traditional journal, entries that are private but will become public after I pass (or will if my instructions are followed!). And I've started other blogs with a narrower focus, songs of political satire or raps between two old men. Meanwhile this one stumbles along, a public journal, a public diary, a public record of one writer's "writing life."

I'm not sure what I want to do with it in the future. I don't think I'll abandon it, so something will be going on, but I may be going in a new direction. A few things have come to mind:

• celebrations and explications of some of my favorite works
  
• advertisements for myself, as Mailer would say, excerpts from and pitches for some of my own work
  
• writing a new short work here, recording the steps and brooding that goes on in the process
  
• carrying on as I have been, doing whatever occurs to me at the time
  

The new year, of course, is a traditional time to begin a new direction if, in fact, one settles in.

Meanwhile, well, you get the picture. Here it is, right in front of you.