One Thousand And Counting

FOR REASONS UNKNOWN TO ME this blog is closing in on a milestone of sorts. It won’t be long (later this year) before I will upload blog post number 1000. I have no idea how it got that far. The closest analogy I can come up with is that “Down the Hall on Your Left” is like a runaway train being run by monkeys.

There are much bigger blogs out there. I know of several that have thirty thousand followers. Numbers like that would make me dizzy. For this blog, if I count all sources, it comes  to a little under one thousand. And I’ll be honest with you – even that number surprises me. Those blogs with the huge number of followers are usually about Cooking, Make-up, or Fashion. I am certainly not in any of those categories. This blog is more about “Stuff,” and that sort of limits things. There are so many subcategories of Stuff that it’s difficult to corral those large numbers. Maybe if I started throwing in some recipes or tips on where to buy Hawaiian Shirts. Nah – that’s just not me.

At least once a week I get an Email from somewhere offering to tell me the “Secrets to Getting 100,000 Followers.”

Yeah, right.

If I was to get 100,000 followers for this blog it would surely indicate that people in asylums and maximum security prisons have been given internet access.  I’m not all that sure that they don’t already, based on some comments I get.

I suppose I could be doing more to “grow” this blog. There are legitimate tactics that can help to increase readership, but to be completely honest, I don’t really care all that much about it. More readers? That would be nice, but that is not why I do this thing.

One thing that I have always felt was important for me, as a writer, was to sit down and write – every day. It has to become a habit, like eating, sleeping, and screaming at the neighbor’s dogs. I know that if I don’t write every day I’ll just get lazy and end up letting it slide for a decade or two.

When I retired, about six years ago, I lost the convenient excuse of “I’m too tired” to justify not writing. I had to look in the mirror, clean the mirror, shave and comb my hair, and then convince myself to buy some cheap pens and get to work.

So, you see, I started this blog as a disciplinary therapy – to write something, anything – stuff – everyday to get into that necessary habit. It worked, I guess.

One unexpected, yet quite delightful, side effect of running off at the keyboard for so long, is the people. I have electronically met a wide range of readers from around the world. There are a few who live here in Terre Haute (That’s French for “I’d thought you’d be taller) who I’ve never met. But there are folks in Europe, South America, and Australia who comment regularly. I enjoy reading their thoughts about what I have tossed into the wind. A number of them are writers – fantastic writers – who create the most wonderful things. I salute you.

The latest figures that I’ve seen tell me that there are people in 68 different countries reading my stuff. God bless ‘em and I hope that they are getting something out of it all. So, you- that fellow in Burma – don’t be afraid to comment and let me know what you think. Don’t be afraid to speak up, because that other fellow in Perth sure isn’t shy about telling me.

I do now write every day, usually early in the morning over coffee. I write on paper, in cursive, and then type it all into the ‘puter, doing a rewrite as I go. That part gets done after lunch. All together I spend about four to five hours a day on it. And in the meantime, in between time, I work on my various fiction projects. It was the fiction that started me doing this blog in the first place.

When I hit blog number 1000 I will probably light a candle or eat something I shouldn’t to mark the day. Then I’ll start on number 1001 also about something mundane.

It’s what I do.

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