Why am I still blogging?...

Now that's a good question.

For some reason I found myself flicking through my old blog posts late last night. Well, not exactly flicking and when I say old blog posts I mean posts that I wrote a while back when the world wasn’t quite the same as it is today. Yesterday and beyond then, day after day flashing up on my screen, my thoughts and actions, doodles and jottings back and back like naughty, lovely, deformed, spiteful, nice, happy, spitting children.

I only flicked through a few hundred of the soon to be fourteen hundred posts I’ve managed to drag out of my tortured artistic soul. As a body of work it’s impressive, so long as you don’t linger too long and focus mainly on the sheer volume of words rather than the content.

Of course, my posts these days are shorter, no longer the pocket novellas that they often used to be. It’s a conscious thing – my readers (such as they are) probably aren’t going to read more than a couple of hundred words. Why would they? I try to keep it to 250 words these days, but even at 250 my entire blog contains 350,000 words minimum and I’m often far more garrulous than I plan to be. This post alone is 544 words, so 284 words over my self imposed limit, well over double in fact.

I still only have 58 followers and can’t remember the last time a new one popped up. Still, being read at all is something of a miracle and I guess that with a total of 143,000 page views (over 100 per post) at least somebody is stumbling across it if only to immediately move on after reading a sentence or glancing at a picture.

As I flicked through the contents of my virtual life a number of thoughts popped into my mind: firstly some of the stuff I’d written wasn’t too bad and a few of the photos, drawings, and collaged images that I’d used to help along the words were rather good. Secondly, my life seems to be a cycle and in some ways my blog is a diary; often coming back to the same themes at the same time of year. Oh, what a creature of habit I am. Thirdly, I realised that even though it might not sparkle all of the time, or be read as much as it once was, it’s an interesting window onto my life… if only to me.

I don’t always manage a daily post these days, I couldn’t deal with that particular pressure any longer, and I think that I’m becoming boringly repetitive. For now though, I’ve decided to keep at it and churn out a few thousand more words. All those 350,000 words could have equally arranged themselves into a couple of decent sized novels instead of my blog. But for that I’d need a plot and (if you’ve ever dipped into my world) you’ll know that I’ve lost that.

So they you have it. My regular soul search to decide whether I should continue to blog, or not to blog, yet again decides that I should, that I must; if only to satisfy and feed my own ego.

Yes, it’s still all about me.