We’re barely a third of the way through 2021. Yet, my blog has already attracted double its average annual number of followers. There may be some reasons for this. For example, I’m blogging regularly this year. I am also sticking to a theme (writing) rather than random content of things I think certain groups of people might find useful. However, all that random past stuff are what gets my blog the most traffic, not my writing posts. The writing posts barely read by the followers, which is fine. I’m mentioning them to make my point that the vast majority of my blog’s most recent followers aren’t human! Rather, they’re like bots, or templated blogs using the same profile pictures, some cultural variations on a name like all French, and a handful of posts each in a layout! What is up with this, WordPress? This isn’t Instagram!
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Those Rejected Poems
A few months ago, I posted about posting poems I had written for poetry competitions, but which I rejected, as their own collection on my poetry blog. It was just to see what would end up there, and, ultimately, if I would make any “mistakes” to reject poems I would want to use later, but wouldn’t be able to since by having been posted online, they would be considered “published” and ineligible for most poetry competitions.
Just a Blog Identity Tweak This Time
Most blogs have a theme to them. If you hadn’t noticed, this blog is like a repository for all kinds of things I write, and create for people to use, except my poetry that has its own dedicated blog to keep things “organized” for me. At times, I have changed the blog tagline to indicate a themed phase I might have been in, which would have made no sense for all the people visiting for previous content because those changes tended to be big. Themes have ranged, in no particular order, from writings, to fashion, personal tests, art, screen wallpapers, Facebook associated stuff, new vocabulary learned, and most recently back to creative writings on my two year journey to do writing more seriously. Less than three months into that journey, I have refined the focus to change the blog identity again, but only with a tweak this time.
The Rejected Poems
I have a poetry blog. It’s nothing special, and I am absolutely not being modest here. Pretty much nobody reads it, right now or ever in the past, and that’s quite fine by me, because I don’t write for the readership. You don’t write and post over 1800 poems for readership over a few decades if you’ve never gotten any readership, so I am honest in saying I don’t write for the readership.
The Saved Writing That’s Not Here
These writing posts from 2021 are meant to be my warm-up writing for the more serious stuff I am doing, and saving for writing contests, potential submissions for publication, and so on, where I can’t have them published online first. These posts have also served habit formation, where I incentivize myself to do something, and get some reward for it to want to do it again until I do it without thinking, for about six weeks as typical habit formation takes. Finally, they serve as practice writing fodder. In development from a poor level to start, there are going to be a lot of “garbage” that will have to be produced on the way to improvement. There has to be. You can’t gradually improve from 1 to 10 without putting out pieces of quality level 1, 2, 3, etc. before you get to 9 and 10. Well, it’s been six weeks, so how are things coming along?
Digital Citizen 