400th Post

Another milestone, I’ve written 400 posts. My posts tend to be fairly long by blog standards, over 1,000 words compared to the 500 word average so using a fairly conservative estimate I’d say this blog has over half a million words.

Stephen King commented that the first million words are the hardest for a writer. If I were to add up the half million words from this blog and the over half million words I’ve written in novels and short stories I’ve surpassed that number in the past two and a half years.

Overall it has been a blast doing this blog, I started it with two major goals. First I wanted to improve my writing and the best way to do that is to write (there’s a surprise) by writing several thousand words a week here I can tell it has helped me do that. The second goal was to help me keep my sanity, it’s debatable whether it did that but at least it gave me a safe outlet for my craziness so that it’s not unleashed onto the unsuspecting public.

The one thing that did sort of surprise me is that I have been slowly but surely building an audience. All the advice I’ve read on building an audience for a blog is to keep a narrow focus. I have no focus so I tried to minimize the shock of topic switching by tackling specific topics on specific days but even doing that I don’t tend to stay very focused.

One thing I would like to say about reaching the 400 milestone is that unfortunately a lot of the blogs I’ve been reading are shutting down because blogging is a lot of work with little tangible payoff. No monetary reward unless you gear your blog as a business endeavor and then it is actual work. As far a publicity even a moderately successful blog won’t help establish your name out of the millions of blogs that are out there. I’d like to say that I’m not going anywhere, I’m shooting for reaching 1,000 posts in the next two and a half years.

So to everyone I’d like to say thanks for sticking with me for the last 399 posts.

By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts