The State of the Blog
When I initially began writing on the internet a little over two years ago, I thought I was quite a good writer. A couple of hundred posts later, and I feel I have improved my writing a lot, and now I'm an awful writer.
The difference of course is that I have learned a lot more about the process of writing, and what constitutes doing it well, losing some amount of naïveté along the way. Now I see I was awful to begin with, but I also think I have since improved - I have found my voice. I write at least somewhat akin to how I speak and have developed something of my own style, although I occasionally break that when I am trying to write something funny. My vocabulary has expanded, the average length of my posts is going up, and I no longer see writing as a chore - I actually look forward to it! Despite writing here every day, I have a very healthy list of potential blog ideas (50+), and I'm sure there are a myriad of topics I'd like to talk about that aren't in the list.
When I started Thoughts From Tartarus, it was intended as a purely selfish endeavour, something that was meant to be cathartic for me. I was not writing for anyone. When I started this blog, it was admittedly to win a bet, but given that precisely one person was actually reading the blog, the outcome became similarly self-centered. Posts were half letters to my friend, half journal entires about whatever was on my mind. I don't have any tracking or analytics on this iteration of the site, so I don't know for sure, but I strongly suspect that I still only have exactly one reader (hi Ted!). In the past month or so, I have noticed that I am actually a little proud of some of the pieces I write, even if they are written daily, often in less than an hour and with little to no editing.
My newfound pride has left me a little confused - what was once an exercise undertaken by and large for me, by me, I would now like to share. There are many thoughts expressed in these posts I would like to share with my (other) friends, and perhaps there are a select few which I think even a total stranger might gain something from. If I were to try to promote the blog somehow, it feels like I would be betraying the original intentions I had when it was conceived, as if I am selling out (even though I would never monetise this and likely never introduce any kind of tracking). Saying to my friends 'hey, I write a blog every day, you should check it out!' seems weird because I think it's arrogant to suggest that my blog is of sufficient quality that it is worth them spending some of their time on it every day, especially when it invariably isn't. Equally, it would make me feel uncomfortable to send my friends a link every time I published a post I thought they might enjoy, because I don't want to be sending them several links to my own work each month. I could also start a mailing list and do a monthly 'best of' email, but then I would have to collect people's data which I inherently dislike the idea of.
I think I'm just going to ask my closest friends - the ones I would like to read this the most - what they think, including whether I should keep writing with a focus on it being solely for myself. I'll report back with my findings.