800? You Gotta Be Kidding!

Yesterday--March 29--I uploaded blog post #800, a piece about the very little money I've made in my writing endeavors. I didn't at first know this was so. But when I looked at my Blogspot information after I'd written it, I saw that it was #800, and I was pretty surprised. Time flies when you're trying to think of things to write about.

Blogspot's stats tell me that I've had a total of 163,810 "hits" on these posts--an average of 204.7625 readers per hit. Not bad, I guess--though, as I've said before, other bloggers, especially celebrity ones, no doubt get that many hits per minute--or second. So it goes in my small world.

Actually, I almost never look at Blogspot's stats (I don't care how many are reading it: I just have fun writing it)--just as I never look at my sales stats on Kindle Direct Publishing. As I wrote yesterday, I get a little check from them at the end of every month, and that's enough for me. It's just nice knowing that my writing is "out there," at least in a cyber if not a tactile sense.

I began DawnReader on January 6, 2012, with a post called "I Am Born." (Link to that first post.) I had no real idea what I was going to do when I started this enterprise--and I'm still not all that sure, though DawnReader has evolved into a site where I serialize books I'm working on (and that has its special terrors), where I write memoir-like pieces, where I vent about issues in education and politics, where--to tell the truth--I kind of figure out what I think about things by writing about them.

This last thought--figuring out by writing--is one of the things that really annoys me about the current craziness in writing instruction. Making kids figure out what they're going to write before they write it is just flat counter-productive and -intuitive--and flies in the face of what we know about just about every "real" writer who ever lived. I've read hundreds (thousands?) of biographies of writers, and by far they write, write, write, figuring out along the way what it is that they're up to. Sure, they may have some preliminary plans, but only the most rigid adhere strictly to them, and here's why: Writing is like being on a train without tracks, a plane without a flight plan. Or--better--it's more like being with Lewis and Clark (and the Corps of Discovery Expedition) than it is being on I-80 with a GPS voice telling you where to go.

Oh, sure, there are sorts of writing we all do that is more formulaic: We know exactly what we have to write, and so we do it. But these are rare--at least in my life. I far prefer traveling the uncharted territory of imagination and memory, prefer reading (and writing) pieces that illuminate the heart.

And these DawnReader posts, in some cases, have been the results of my journeys. I hope to have 800 more--and then 800 more--and then ...