The Man Cave

I’ve been writing this blog for nearly a decade (I’ll hit the ten-year mark in October), typically posting on alternating Sundays, twenty-six-plus entries per year. It’s a longstanding project and not one that has yielded much by way of tangible or measurable rewards.

The site isn’t set up for advertising or to sell a specific product (with the arguable exception of the posts dedicated to specific book projects). And even if it were, the standards of the blog would suggest that a post with a couple hundred readers is relatively “widely read.”

So why carry on?

I write a lot. That’s not meant as a brag, because I’m well past a point in my life when I’d try to equate quantity to quality of work, and make no mistake: quality is my objective as a writer. Still, this blog alone represents a fair bit of written work—conservatively, 20,000 words of writing a year, in addition to an average of over 150,000 words a year for other Internet writing, plus a more variable, conservatively estimated 75,000 words of literary writing, and not getting into email correspondence, narrative feedback to student work and I’m probably writing as many words as are contained in War and Peace for every two-to-three years.

With that volume of output, there’s an argument in favor of narrowing focus. After all, I may be writing a Tolstoy-esque quantity of words—wouldn’t that be more gratifying with a more Tolstoy-esque readership worldwide? Indeed, I’d suggest most of my contemporaries would advocate for one of two approaches—focusing on the craft of the most artistic, to-me-most-rewarding literary writing, or focus on freelance work to maximize income. A more balanced perspective might support some of each. But this blog?

To be transparent, I’ve thought of wrapping up this blog a number of times. I closed The A Cappella Blog after twelve years because I’d said what I felt I needed to say about a cappella, and wasn’t making money off that project, either. I still had plenty say and a wider readership for a weekly wrestling column at 411mania, when I let that one go for the time investment and lack of money attached. And there are the literary discussions. Two of my grad school professors, whom I consider friends have a podcast about non-fiction writing, and have more than once pilloried the culture of blogs and online personal writing, as a paltry analog to literary essay writing. I don’t think they’re talking about me in those moments—I don’t think my blog registers on their radars—but I do get the sense they’re talking about the kind of writing I do here, and are quick to dismiss it.

This blog represents something different for me, though. I suppose much of the appeal of it has always come back to the freedom to do whatever I want with it—be it the frequent forays into personal nostalgia, delving into pop culture I enjoy, or oddball “philosophical” wanderings like today’s post. When I don’t have a boss to report to, an eye on website traffic for financial concerns, or concerns about the artistic merit of a literary pursuit, what’s left is a veritable playground of writing space, not altogether unlike when I posted short fiction to my Tripod page years before I’d first submit to a literary journal, or the hand-written magazines I’d produce for an audience of my ever-patient grandmother (whom, in retrospect, I assume could only read a certain percentage of my chicken scratch anyway). Unlike a carefully manicured office space, this blog is something more like my man cave—not that it’s particularly masculine in any conventional sense, but the juvenile, often as not random nature of such a space best fits this online space, cluttered with relics from my past, and that paraphernalia I should probably know better than to invest time and energy into now, and yet that I have little desire to dispose of completely.

So take a seat, dear reader. Thank you for coming. Rest assured, there are few enough of you here for you each to have ample elbow room, to help yourself to a bowl of Nacho Cheese Doritos and a can of Mountain Dew from the mini-fridge. Tell your dad jokes, because no one here’s going to judge you. Don’t be afraid to fart. Enjoy it all while it lasts.

Make yourself at home while I tell you a story.