Wednesday, February 19, 2014

#145 - More Random Thoughts

I've been thinking a lot lately about writing, which means I haven't been doing much of it. Well, that's not quite true. I've been doing more song lyric writing of late, something that seems to come in starts and stops, much as it has for 40 years.

I think the writing has gotten better. After 40 years, it would have to improve, wouldn't you think? One thing it has done is gotten more introspective, I think. I've been writing of late about the things left undone, perhaps as a sort of purge as I begin to think about the things I hope to do as I begin to look forward to the next stage of life.

One of the things I hope to do in that next stage is travel. Deep down, I think I am a restless spirit. My wife and I both tell people we are nomads or gypsies and cite the fact that both of our fathers were truck drivers. I think I've always had an urge to roam. When I was younger, I saw moving as a way to break from my mistakes, to make a clean start, if you will.

In my previous life in television and radio, I moved seven times over a ten year period. I was not one for putting down roots. Now, after living ten years in the same city, I have an urge to move again, although perhaps not at quite the same pace.

There is one blog I read regularly that captures a good sense of the kind of life I am looking to lead. That blog, rvsue and her canine crew, captures the daily essence for me of life along the road less traveled (to borrow from the M. Scott Peck book of the same name). As Sue paints it in her word portraits, life is not always exciting, but it is always fresh and always real.

Sue's blog has, at last count, attracted in excess of one million visits. The figure is mind boggling to me, not least of all because this blog stands at roughly 0.02% of that figure. I'm not jealous of that success, but I am most certainly in awe of it.

Thinking about Sue's blog and mine got me to thinking about my rationale for numbering my blog posts. When I first decided to number my posts, I think I did so in order to see how far I had come, a means of measurement, I suppose. I've also come to see the numbering as a way of showing myself that I was writing something substantial, even if it wasn't always of great import.

Writing, although I see it as one of my talents, is not something I can easily sit down to do. The numbering became an easy way for me to measure production, I suppose, especially since I still can't make myself sit down to write that novel.

I am also coming to see the numbering of blog posts in a different light. The numbers are becoming to me something like stepping stones or mileposts along the way. Some travel blogs contain maps with numbers that illustrate where the author was at a given point of time. The numbers serve to allow the readers to visually follow along with the author on his or her journey.

I am coming to see my blog post numbers as serving a similar purpose. Subconsciously, perhaps, the numbers allow any readers to follow a map of my journey. I cannot post a visual map of my mind (it would be very messy, for one thing), so the numbers are as close as I can come.

One last number just came to mind. At my current rate of page views, I only need to write 59, 736 more posts to reach a million views. One down, 59,735 to go.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

you have another visitor to add
I feel that most people have "some great story" stuck inside of them. as for the quality of one's writing I think like most things improve with age.