409 In Ten Years

 

409

In Ten Years

 

By John W. Vander Velden

 

Ramblings...Essays and Such... began as an experiment, and March marks the completion of my Blog’s tenth year.  Fact is I had no idea what a blog was when I began in 2012. I had read that as an author I needed an internet presence. Whatever that meant.

I did a little research.

Small quantities of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

I hadn’t even looked at anybody else’s blog before I began. Yet I had an idea and found a platform that was free. Free is good. And I figured I would post one thing each week. But what would that one thing be? I could post bits about writing. But in truth knew less about writing than blogging. So instead I began writing short pieces.

100-300 words pieces were my goal. Originally. For no particular reason other than I felt certain readers would be put off if I rambled on and on. So with those parameters I sat down at the keyboard and wrote more than fifteen shorts before I posted my first. I would not commit to something like a blog for less than six months, and having four months of material gave me a smattering of confidence.

So March of 2012, as I had said before, I began my blogging career. If you can call it anything that approaches a worthwhile endeavor. I’m not certain I can. At first it was like a party where no one came. In some ways it still is. Once in a while one of my posts got a few page views. But things began to change a bit in 2016. The numbers went up just a bit. But then about two years ago something happened. Someone discovered an old post, Broken Teacup. It went form an obscure post with ten or twenty page views to my most read essay. To date Broken Teacup has been read over 17,000 times. No, that is not viral, but I would say it is at least bacterial.  

So this is the 409^th post on my blog. 409 short essays, poems, and something I call micro-stories. There would be more but I reduced the amount of new material I contributed in 2018 so I could use the time to focus on other writing projects. Also in my inexperience early on I deleted many of my early posts. Thought I could not have over twenty posts on the blog at a time.

Silly me.

I have restored many of them and will add others in the future. But all the same 409 bits of writing seems like a sizable quantity.

10 years.

Some might commend me for persistence. Others might ridicule me for my folly. Whether anyone sees my blogging as plus or minus doesn’t really matter to me for I continue to trundle on.

So I thank you for taking a few minutes out of your Saturday to read my words. And hope you have found my words worth your time.

I thank you...409 times. (498 Words) 3-11-2022