On December 17th, 2017, I celebrated TumbleweedWrites’ 100th blog post and took the opportunity to reflect on the journey my site had been on up until that point. I always knew that I wanted to follow it up at some point with a direct sequel that would similarly evaluate the current state of the blog and serve as a kind of progress report. At work, we have these “town halls” every quarter, which are company-wide meetings where the CEO and the board of executives will talk transparently about where we are and where we’re going. I see these posts as being a little similar. I want to share some insights about how TumbleweedWrites has been doing since that 100th post—what’s changed, how I’ve been feeling about it, and what I envision going forward.
It’s been a long time coming, but the time feels right. I’ve been wanting to blog about the blog for a while now—all I needed was a number that was suitably sexy. I considered doing it for my 200th blog post, but I wasn’t ready then. I didn’t have too much to say. I then planned it for my 250th blog post, but I forgot. Here we are at 300—feels like a nice round number. I’m not sure when the next one will be. I’ll definitely commemorate my 1000th blog post if I ever get there, but at my current rate I wouldn’t expect that before the heat death of the universe.
- The first thing that jumps out when looking at TumbleweedWrites’ journey to 300 is the drastic way the frequency of my posts have changed down the years. It took me only 8 months to reach 100 blog posts, but 7 years to reach 300. I started this blog on April 19th 2017 and wrote its 100th post on December 17th of that same year. Back then my posts were a lot shorter, about 500-1000 words on average. The blog was also the main thing in my life back then. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I was feeling quite lost after graduating from the University of Winchester in 2014. There didn’t seem to be any point to my life back then. I didn’t do anything. There was nothing I was passionate about, nothing I worked toward, and I felt like I had no reason to get up in the morning. But then things changed in 2017, and I’m still not sure why. Ever since, I’ve always thought of 2017 as the year my life changed. All of a sudden, I was seized by an insatiable ambition. I felt a restless energy to be productive and fill my life with meaningful experiences. All of a sudden, I cared. And it was in this mindset that I started blogging. I’d say that in 2017, TumbleweedWrites was the center of my life. In the years that followed, I started to focus my energy on other things—like building a career, moving to London, and writing fiction. The blog remained—and remains—important to me, but it’s not my number one priority like it was in that first year.
- In 2017, I wrote 105 posts, followed by 78 in 2018, 32 in 2019, 26 in 2020, 31 in 2021, 10 in 2022, and 10 in 2023. As of this post, I’ve written 8 in 2024. It’s not just the frequency of my posts that have changed though. Over the years, I think the content has changed a little too. I write less often, but my posts are notably longer now. I’m not sure why that is exactly. In 2017, I’d often start a post when I woke up and finish it by lunchtime of the same day. Now, my blog posts are 5000-10,000 words long on average, and each one is something I meticulously chip away at for weeks or even months before posting. I have a lot less free time now, so it makes sense that I don’t blog as often as I used to—but I have little idea why I seem incapable of writing short posts anymore. It bothers me a little bit; in an ideal world I’d be writing blog posts that are concise but powerful, where I’m getting maximum value out of every sentence. I’m definitely more perfectionist in my approach to blogging than I was in 2017—perhaps wanting to ensure that what I write has good value or quality leads me to write more? It could be that since my schedule doesn’t really permit me to do spontaneous, “thought of the day” posts anymore, I’ve naturally focused more on reviews or essay-style posts that require more preparation. I no longer do little cooking updates like Three Meals We Made For Supper! or Buffalo Chicken Nachos! (apparently I was so impressed with the results an exclamation point was regularly called for). Neither do I write news articles like Who are the Winners & Losers of the Kyrie Irving-Isaiah Thomas Trade?, which are designed for instant readership and, by their nature, can only be relevant for a short period of time. When I choose subjects for my blog posts now, I try to think of posts that will be relevant for a long time. I think more about future readers rather than quick hits. This probably also contributes to my pivot toward longer posts—thorough breakdowns and deep dives. Each post becomes a little project I work toward in my spare time. And the fact that these days I’m mostly just doing my 9-5, as opposed to traveling or pissing out my ass, has undoubtedly led to a reduction of “life update” posts. I’m not sure it completely explains why my content has gotten so long, but it’s another factor I think.
- It’s never clear what posts will do well. But as you’d expect, my reviews and essays on pop culture do better than posts that relate to my personal life. There are more people interested in Dune, Red Dead Redemption, or Chelsea Football Club than there are people interested in my mental health or anecdotes from my school days. And those posts that do well might take a long time to gain a readership after being published. Sometimes real-world events will cause old posts to go viral, which is always nice. But since it’s an inexact science, and this blog is nothing more than a hobby, I only ever write about things that genuinely interest me. It would be impossible to motivate myself otherwise.
- My most popular blog post of all time is Dissecting the Themes of The White Lotus, which I published in September 2021. However, it didn’t really get any views until the second season of that show came out over a year later. Starting in October 2022, it suddenly exploded in views, continuing to do well in 2023 and gradually cooling down. My second most-viewed blog post is My Favorite Quote From Every Chapter of Normal People, published in November of last year. This one took less time to take off, and at the rate it’s going, it will overtake my post on The White Lotus to become this blog’s most popular entry. As a general point, posts about pop culture will continue to get views over time; I always see a trickle of views coming in regularly for ones like 50 Reasons Why I Love Elvis or Rating Book Covers for God Emperor of Dune. In contrast, posts like My First Week of College in the USA, Grandma Jane’s Pumpkin Bars, or The Crescent City Diaries #1 spike in views around the time they’re published, but get almost no recurring views. It makes sense, as posts centered on my life can’t exactly trend very well.
- Despite their lack of popularity, I’ve always felt that my more personal blog posts are my best work. Anyone can write a review of a film or a book, and there are many more worthwhile takes out there than mine. But only I can write about my life and how I feel. I’ve always been a great admirer of creative non-fiction, which is how I’d categorize my personal and travel blog posts. They might cover things that are real, but I write them the same way I’d write a short story or a poem. I think a lot more about the thesis. The ones that work are the ones where I’m able to contextualize my lived experiences in relation to broader, more universal themes like mental health or something. The ones that don’t work are the ones where I’m unable to extract any wider meaning or relevance from a given experience.
- The creative non-fiction blog posts I’m most proud of are My Study Abroad Overview: Nothing Gold Can Stay, Football, England, & Me, and Making Friends in the USA Part 1. Whenever I write in this genre, I’m always hoping they’ll turn out like these three, and be something I’ll enjoy looking back on in years to come. As for my review and essay posts, I don’t think I’ve done better than The Last of Us Part 2 is a Masterpiece and Dissecting the Themes of the White Lotus Season 2. While they’re both long (over 10,000 words each), I don’t think I waffled too much, strayed off course, or wasted the reader’s time with superfluous content—which are all my biggest blogging pitfalls. Both of these reviews felt laser-focused on the heart of what I was trying to say, and each sentence felt like it had value. This doesn’t often happen, and these are rare examples of reviews where I stand by what I said years after writing them.
- In contrast, there are a few blog posts—of every category—that I wish had turned out better. Sometimes I discover when I’m writing something that I don’t have as much to say on it as I thought, or that I don’t really have anything original or interesting to say about it. The worst is when I get an idea in my head that seems great, but when I actually set down to writing it, nothing I can come up with really works. I’m left feeling that either the idea wasn’t that special to begin with, or that I’m simply not good enough to write about it in a way that’s effective or engaging. There are some pieces of writing that make me cringe. In my early posts, I can see that I often wrote in the same way one would speak. In 2017 I used a lot more humor, and looking back on certain sentences, it does feel a little contrived, a little silly. This then presents me with a dilemma. I often go back over old posts and correct any grammatical errors or typos I come across. But is it right to cut out sentences I either no longer stand by, or that I’m embarrassed about? Part of me feels like it’s wrong, as each blog post captures how I would have felt and how I would have communicated at the time. It’s pretty normal to cringe at things you used to find funny—we’ve all been there. It’s normal, too, for opinions to change over time. And this blog is meant to be a lifelong project, a kind of open journal. So it feels counterintuitive to editorialize retrospectively, like it’s a vain instinct to control my self-image. I think if I ever wrote something that was deeply offensive or harmful (hopefully out of pure ignorance!) then it would be the right thing to do to change it. But things I’m just embarrassed about or opinions I don’t believe anymore? It feels wrong but it’s so tempting. For example, when I look back on my reviews for Game of Thrones season 8, I feel in retrospect that I was way too soft. Maybe I was afraid, at the time, of writing something too negative. Or maybe it took a while for my feelings on season 8 to really come together into something clear and coherent. The conflict lies in the fact that the blog exists as both a record of specific points in time, but also as something to be consumed at any point in time. Or as long as the WordPress servers are still running, anyhow. I think the fact that I want old content on my blog to remain continuously available (and, hopefully, relevant) is a big part of the reason I get troubled by passages that I judge to be embarrassing, poorly written, or inappropriate.
- How do I see TumbleweedWrites going forward? As I said, it’s not my priority like it was in 2017. It’s a hobby I work on intermittently in the background, but it’s nonetheless very important to me. I see it as a kind of lifelong art project, like when people take the same picture every year, or film a few seconds every day. I like seeing other people do that sort of thing, and leave a lasting imprint of their unique story. So I’d like to do the same. When I think about the blog nowadays, I think of it much more in terms of future benefit and posterity. That’s why the personal blog posts tend to mean more to me, because they’re in service of this lifelong project. Whereas a straightforward review of Doom Eternal or Phantom Thread doesn’t seem to have much value long-term. Will I care about those posts in 30 years’ time? Probably not. Sometimes I find a middle ground between the my own life and the world at large. Two posts I’m proud of that stand out to me are My Favorite Quote from Every Chapter of Normal People and Rating Book Covers for God Emperor of Dune. I don’t know if they’re going to be that interesting for me to read when I’m 60, but I like how they blur the lines between review and creative non-fiction. So I’d like to do more posts like that, and I’d like to do shorter creative non-fiction pieces too. But I’m content with having other priorities in life, and I know now exactly what I want from my blog, so it’s likely that my current rate of 10 posts a year will continue. If I can, I’ll try push it up to 15!
TumbleweedWrites 