Five years of blogging

Today marks the fifth anniversary of this blog. Five years—half a decade—does not amount to much in the end, but this website and blog began in a time that now feels utterly remote to me. I had just started a new job, my first full-time teaching position, and was getting used to a commute I could now do in my sleep. Sarah and I only had two kids, one only a few months old. We weren’t quite aware of it just yet, but we were outgrowing our apartment. And the year before, I had self-published my first novel and a novella I had whipped up in two weeks. There was kind enthusiasm among friends but few sales.

I created this website to coincide with and, hopefully, help promote the release of Dark Full of Enemies, a novel which had itself lain dormant for almost five years, from its completion just before Sarah and I got married until that winter of 2017. I had written but not yet finished revising Griswoldville, and I hoped a website would help with that project, too.

It may surprise y’all, now, but I almost deleted the blog option when I first started building this site. I had even scoffed when I saw it on the default version of the template. Thanks, but no thanks, had been my attitude. I don’t want to get fired for something I write there. And who reads blogs, anyway?

But I hesitated. I had run a blog in college, one of those free blogging sites that one now only encounters in the dirty alleys and out-of-the-way park benches of Google searches, and I had found it great fun. This remembrance also brought to mind the diary I had kept for four or five years, daily from January of 2008 through most of grad school, then sporadically, catching up when I missed days here and there, and finally sputtering out sometime in the years between grad school and marriage.

What that Blogspot page and the diary had in common, though, that made me hesitate to write off blogging on this new site, was practice—both in the sense of training and in the Alasdair MacIntyre sense of a life-shaping routine. A regularly maintained blog is good practice.

When I had kept that blog during and just after college, I had also produced one almost complete World War II novel as well as the manuscript that became No Snakes in Iceland. When I had kept that diary, I had also finished No Snakes in Iceland, put it through its first rounds of readers and revisions, and written the rough draft of Dark Full of Enemies. Habitually writing something, I decided, would prepare me for the day I need to write the important thing.

And so here I am.

I have no regular schedule and no real plan. I just know that I need to write here occasionally, often enough to keep limber, the same way I need exercise. (More than ever, in fact.) Five or six posts a month feels, to me, like I’m staying on track. And I have no set topic. This blog, to borrow a concept from Alan Jacobs, whose blog I regularly read, is a commonplace book, and so whatever catches my eye, interests me, irritates me, makes me stop to think, or that I enjoy and want to tell others about may wind up here.

So now, half a decade after launching this blog, my wife and I have three kids, we live in a house in a slightly more country part of a crowded county, I have published two more novels and yet another is going through the usual cycles of hibernation, reading, and revision—and I have hundreds of posts here. (I have the specific number written down in my office at school, and am now on Christmas break. Excellent foresight.) These have been fun to write—good practice, just as I’d hoped, as well as a place to ruminate and occasionally just vent—and have connected me to some good people whom I might never have “met” otherwise. I am deeply grateful.

A few statistical giblets for those of y’all who are interested:

Traffic to my site, most of which goes to the blog, has steadily increased every year since I started. In 2019, with two years to get established, the site got over 6,700 distinct visits. In 2020 that nearly doubled to over 12,500. In 2021 it doubled again: 25,390. And already this year, with a couple weeks to go, it’s received 36,000. Pageviews are even higher, though I am no web analytics expert and can’t tell you much of what this signifies. Now all I need to do is turn this traffic into book sales!

At any rate, the website and blog have served their purpose: I am getting practice, and people are reading and, occasionally, seeking out and buying my books. And I’m most thankful for that.

Again, I’m thankful for those of y’all who regularly read what I post here, especially considering what an idiosyncratic jumble of topics it must seem to be, and thanks most of all to those who have reached out over the years. Hearing from y’all has been an encouragement, a fun source of conversation, and it has made me a better writer. Just last week one of y’all caught a glaring error in my post about run-on sentences, which I was able to fix—or at least slap a Band-Aid on.

I’m looking forward, God willing, to five more years of writing practice here! Thank y’all for being here, and thanks, as always, for reading.