Looking forward

Janus was the Roman god of doors -- both sides of doors, front and back -- endings and beginnings. His two faces looked simultaneously into the future and into the past. He gave his name to January, the beginning of the new year, when we ponder both the past and the future.

As this January comes to an end, the Northwest Corner observes its own landmark: this is my 201st post, the beginning of the blog's third "century." Like Janus, I look backward and forward simultaneously.

Looking backward, I'm happy with the diversity of subjects covered this past year. I'm less happy with the overall quality of my writing. One original goal was to practice and improve stylistically. I doubt that I've made much progress in that area. Although I face no deadlines and have all the time I need to write each post, I tend to write quickly and journalistically. I do a significant amount of self-editing after writing my first draft, but the editing tends to be cosmetic. It generally does not attack basic problems of organization. As a result, I suspect that readers often ask, "What was the point of this post? What was the author trying to accomplish?"

This suspicion assumes the existence of a body of readers. This blog does not have a counter, so I have no idea how many hits per week I get, but other evidence suggests not a lot.

When I sample other blogs, I notice much more focus in topic. There are travel blogs, cooking blogs, exercise blogs, model railroad blogs. There are also blogs that commemorate the daily activities of families, or the neurotic obsessions of lonely writers. The writing may often be mediocre at best, but each of these blogs has a natural constituency, and each attracts significantly more readers than mine.

I suspect that my choice of subject matter is too varied, and too idiosycratic, to attract a regular readership. However, I made the original decision that I would discuss topics that were of interest to myself, of sufficient interest to spend some time writing and occasionally researching. Although my vanity -- always present -- longs to attract an enormous readership, that's not why I started my blog. Nor am I a Charles Dickens, feverishly writing stories with mass appeal in order to feed myself and pay the mortgage. Thanks to Google's Blogger, my overhead is nil, and my only investment is my time -- and I find writing these posts an entertaining -- even therapeutic! -- way to spend a few hours weekly.

Therefore, I anticipate writing on a similar diversity of topics in the coming year. I do hope to avoid my native tendency to "rush into print," taking more time in the future to think through the organization of each post. I'd like to be able to skim back through them all next January, experiencing no cringe of embarrassment