Earlier in the week, I made mention of having passed ten years of work writing in this webspace. In that commentary, I give a gloss of my site’s statistics, marking the changes to readership and productivity over time, and I’m gratified that, since a nadir in 2017-2018, my performance overall has been increasing. I could push more posts out into the world, perhaps; I’ve done so before, although I like to think that my writing has improved–and doing better work usually takes more time, meaning fewer individual pieces get out into the world. It’s certainly the case that I could be better about monetizing this webspace (although doing so has some possible problems; payment-facilitators don’t always like the kinds of things that I say, though I suppose I might be able to restrict some of the stuff that has naughtier words in it behind some kind of subscription–I’m not sure how all that would work, though). However such things may be, though, there’s some pleasure in seeing that I can keep something like this going, even if there is room to improve–but there’s always such room, for all things and by all people. I do not claim such greatness as to be exempt from all of that.
I have not generally gone on as much in such posts as the tenth-anniversary post as I might about what looking back prompts me to feel. Yes, I try to express gratitude that I am in such a situation as allows me to indulge my writerly passions, and I note being glad to see that there are eyes on my work; I am both grateful and glad of such things. But I am not only so, or not only about them.
One thing that having been at work on a project across time does it allow for a view of changes over that time. I have something like a stable record of my writing and the life that enfolds it, one that is open to public view. If it is the case that I am aware of a (potential) reading public and enact some curation of myself in response thereto, it is also the case that no such act can be untouched by whoever performs it. Greater minds than mine have noted that each of us is, at any given time, enacting one or more roles for one or more audiences, but there is something enacting the role, some actor playing the part, and even with the same lines and stage direction, there will be differences among performers, something of the actor inhabiting the part regardless of the actor or the part. So much is to say that even my curated-for-some-imagined-public self-presentation reveals much of who and what I have been and still am, and the changes to me over that time are clear even without recourse to the journals I still keep.
About some such things, I will not write here; I have plans for their discussion, a few of which bear in on the series of scholarly somedays I’ve cited across the years. About some of them, or at least one of them, though, I will comment now: there’s definitely been a change to my writing style across time. I can–and maybe will, another scholarly someday–pull out individual blog posts I’ve left in this webspace and distill out their formal features, things like word- and paragraph-counts, paragraph- and sentence-lengths, and reading level on any of several scales. I can look more concretely, albeit with more than a shred of narcissism, at common topics and treatments. Both might well be worth doing, but both exceed what such a blog post as this can really support; for now, it will suffice to say, I think, that I feel myself to be less stilted now than I was then. That’s not to say that I write more simply now than then; I’d have to pull data to be sure of that, but it does not feel so, in any event. If anything, I’m more complicated now; I feel more that I write who I am than who I think I have to be at this point. Given what I have given up, that much makes sense; while I have a public for which to perform here, I do not have editors (yet), and that’s a whole different kind of thing.
I’m not at all displeased by this. I think it’s better writing. I hope it’s better writing; with more than ten more years of practice behind it at this point, it ought to be–just as I ought to be, and am, pleased that I have readers yet who stick with me. I hope what I give you is what you want and need.
Help me get another ten years of writing; have me write for you!
Elliott RWI 