The Hundredth(ish) Post

This isn’t my hundredth post. It was meant to be, but then I got distracted and scheduled things carelessly, so it is my hundredth and fifth post. I thought, given that the one hundredth post is something of a milestone, I would take the opportunity to talk briefly about the blog itself, what I’ve done with it, and what I intend to do.

So, one hundred posts. Generally, my posts are over a thousand words long, which I understand to be highly unfashionable. Recently, the length of posts has been dropping, but the overall average has to be around a thousand words. That means that I have written one hundred thousand words on here, roughly the length of a novel.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not the best for staying power – I tend to get distracted easily, and so I think of that one hundred thousand words as an achievement. Over the course of (almost) a year, I’ve updated semi-regularly, with only one significant gap – I went to the states, and then was incredibly busy when I came back.

I didn’t expect, when I started writing on here, to get as much of a kick out of it as I do. I love watching various numbers – subscribers, views, comments – tick glacially upwards. I find it incredibly validating that people, even if only a few, do actually read things I write.

I still don’t get very many views, but I think that is to be expected. I write clunkily, at length, in an over-saturated market. Still, I value every one, even if I am a little confused as to what some of my readers are looking for. My most popular post is this one, about Sonnet XXX by Edna St. Vincent Millay. I am unclear why it is so popular, but an awful lot of search terms that lead to my site are some variant on “Edna xxx”. I don’t know if the poem is secretly incredibly popular, or if there is a famous adult actress called Edna. Frankly, both of those possibilities seem equally unlikely.

Currently, the blog is focused more than anything else on reviews – mostly books, mostly fantasy, but with films and horror and a sprinkling of other stuff too. I’d like to change that. The trouble with reviews is that reviews of similar things tend to get repetitive fast, so I need to be reading very widely constantly to keep up; it’s no fun if there’s a series I want to finish, or if I don’t get time to read for a couple of days.

So I want to move out of my niche slightly. I’m aware that that, too, is incredibly unfashionable and not recommended, but I was never particularly good at staying in a single bracket. So over the next couple of weeks, the type of posts should start to slowly change. There will still be reviews, but they won’t be the overwhelming majority anymore.

I want to write more about books and genres in general, commentary rather than reviews. Strangely enough, there isn’t actually very much of it online, and what there is is mostly limited to trope spotting. I’d like to explore and analyse and argue, not just recommend. I’d also like to post more creative things, of varying types.

I’m not promising anything world-shattering, and the blog will, for at least the forseeable future, still look much the same and involve much the same things. There might just be a wider variety of post types which you are obviously free to ignore if they don’t interest you.

Given the limited number of tags and my small readership, it is unlikely that many people will see this post. Should you, gentle reader, come across it, feel free to leave comments/suggestions below. If you disapprove of the coming changes, if you’ve always hated the way I used dashes, if you just hate everything I write and would like me to stop talking, now would be the time to say so.