Again I Come to the End

Once again I am feeling that I'm not sure blogging is working out.

If I blog once a day, I get 100 visits/day.
If I blog several times a day about the latest topics I can find, at my wittiest, I get 160 visits a day.

Not that hits, or growth, is everything. I don't know.

I've been blogging for ~8 years now, and my readership has hardly changed at all. I need to admit that I just don't have the blogging touch, whatever it is that attracts readers and grows a site.

I should be working harder on the articles I have been commissioned to write, and that I hope to write for somebody. My blogging is certainly not making editors decide that they definitely ought to seek me out and hire me -- if anything, probably the opposite.

I should be working on a book or two -- if I don't now, I never will.

Blogging divides my attention with no recompense. I need to get more serious.

I need to make more money.

I also need to focus on my health. I need to lose weight, but more than that, since my episode of cervical stenosis this past winter, I am still having trouble walking correctly. You probably couldn't tell from looking at me walk, but my legs just don't work right. Even when I walk a few steps, they just don't work right. In the middle of the night when I walk up and have to go to the bathroom, I am peg-legged. During the day I have trouble walking for even 50 ft sometimes. Since my surgery I haven't walked for more than 10 minutes -- my legs just get tired and cramped up and it's like walking through mud. It's been six months since my surgery and is not getting a lot better. For someone who in their 30s went on a couple of memorable and magical long-distance hikes -- 350 miles in 6 weeks in 1994, and 1500 miles in 5 months in 1996 -- this is difficult to accept, and heartbreaking if I let myself think about it, which I have not done since my surgery.

--

Maybe I can't write books. But I used to make a decent living from writing articles, and I need to get back to that. In any case, I just can't spend any more time hoping that blogging will somehow build my name or make it easier (i.e. more profitable) to be a writer. It doesn't. I'm not an A-lister, and I never will be.

--

I watch Oliver, who is so little, and to whom everything is a wonder. Just jumping around is, for him, a definite joy. I remember that feeling, sort of -- do you? -- and I envy him.

Thanks for reading. I will definitely miss most of you.

I appreciate your readership, and, especially your comments. Take care.