What Is There to Say?

What is there to say?

I think about writing a lot. I read my old posts, reflect upon all of the changes in outlook I’ve had since writing them. When I do think of something to say, I dump it into an all-too-often hastily written Facebook post, then I call it a day.

Facebook “markets” the content for me. They do their own maintenance. And the audience is essentially guaranteed: I know at least some portion of my few hundred Facebook friends will see what I write.

But here?

During the 2000s, I spent a lot of time blogging, but too much of that time was spent bike-shedding: I’d focus on what I thought were the easy details — tinkering with code, design elements, and features — rather than the weightier task of writing coherent content on a consistent basis.

Still, there was a point where this blog — this hodgepodge mess of discordant thoughts and no real identity — was earning me a small paycheck every couple of months or so from advertising. The blog was a member of at least one “best blogs” community, and according to Alexa traffic ratings, it was one of the top 100,000 most visited websites on the Internet.

I had an audience. But what did I have to say?

The vast majority of my traffic was coming in for a scant few posts. I published a checklist of diecast car toys from the first Cars movie, wrote about the Bible’s examples of positive non-monogamous marriage, dipped my toes into the “King James Version only” discussion, and wrote about my (probably now irrelevant) WordPress plugin. For a whole lot of users, the handful of posts on those few topics were a hot destination, with conversations running into the hundreds of comments.

None of those things are terribly relevant to me now. What is there to say?

I’m working on figuring that out.

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