The Curious Incident of the Blogger at Update Time

If I had a regular readership, they would have noticed something last Friday. Or rather, they would have noticed the lack of something, a fact that gives me tremendous pleasure in its similarity to a plot element in the Sherlock Holmes story Silver Blaze.

Yes, I did not post a new entry to my blog last Friday, even though I all but pinky-sweared that that was exactly what I was going to do for at least a year to come. I did that because of something I recall David Morgan-Mar saying once. In the annotations of his glorious Irregular Webcomic (if memory serves right, maybe it was somewhere else) he stressed the importance of regular updates for building a readership (sorry for the passive-aggressive opening line, by the way). If you force yourself to have an update at regular intervals, as Irregular Webcomic ironically does and has been doing even through a sort-of hiatus, you will produce content, for better or for worse. If you only produce content when you feel like it, you probably won’t because you are too self-critical or too lazy or you will claim to be too self-critical in order to have an excuse for being so lazy all the time, you bum!

-ahem-

That idea is certainly not new or unique to Mr Morgan-Mar, and everybody who has never read about it can go do that where it is explained better than I can. Everybody who has already heard about it has already heard about it. In both cases, there is not much sense in me explaining it in greater detail than I have already (so, like, almost half a detail, all in all).

So why mention it at all? Two reasons, really. Reason the first: To tell everybody who cares to know my on view on the subject and that I very much agree with the concept of regular updates. The quality of writing will hopefully improve post after post after post after post. Who knows, one day I might even break the habit of repetition that makes English teachers so delightfully mad.

Reason the second is both a little more complicated and a little more self-indulgent. Contrary to claims to the contrary I do indeed have a regular readership (again, sorry for the passive-aggressive behaviour). This readership consists of one single person who I had the pleasure and privilege to spend some time with last week. A couple of days, actually, with Thursday and Friday falling smack dab into the middle of those few days. But, in a probably vain hope of doing something against similar problems in the future, I know have a nifty little notebook to take notes in and then turn thos notes into blog posts, hopefully building a buffer for those times when I cannot write stuff because of, like, circumstances and stuff. Another lesson I learned from David Morgan-Mar.

That notebook just so happens to be small and blue and was handed to me by a very kind reader of this blog. It is inscribed with the hopelessly optimistic lie “A little blue notebook for great blue thoughts” We will see about that.

There is also an unofficial third reason for mentioning all that hoopla about regular updates, to be honest: sorry for the lack of a new post last Friday!