As often happens to free-lancers, for the last couple of months I’ve
been very busy. That’s a fact, not an excuse.
But then again, no excuse (or fact) is worthy when it means taking for
granted the kindness and loyalty of the people who support you, and one fact
that comes home to me every time I check my blog stats is that the readership
I’ve gathered for this blog is loyal and kind beyond all logic. The facts speak
for themselves: In the past eight years, this blog has burgeoned from a mere
handful of readers to peaks of literally thousands of hits for certain
particularly popular entries. But what inspires me the most—as well as shames me—is
that, during long periods like my latest hiatus, when I fail to publish a
single line for weeks on end, the stats
show that a faithful core readership checks in here between six hundred and
seven hundred fifty times a month to see what’s new! Furthermore, many of those
who find nothing new go back through the index and read pieces they might have
missed in the past.
I just want you all to know that I am overwhelmed with gratitude for
this, the kindest gesture any writer can ask for—that people are eager to read
his/her work. That’s why I decided this week to impose a twice-monthly blog
deadline on myself, and I will give those deadlines for The Southern Yankee priority over any other activity, not for the
sake of self-discipline, but to reward the extraordinary persistence and
loyalty of my readers. That said, as of today, The Southern Yankee will present a new entry, at the very least, on
the 13th and 27th of every month...as well as
whenever else the spirit moves me to post additional pieces.
When I started this blog in 2008, I really didn’t have very high hopes
for it.
For one thing, although I became a professional Internet user very early
on, in the mid-nineties, it was out of necessity rather than choice, since I
had decided to leave the big city (Buenos Aires), where I’d been making a
living in journalism for twenty years, to take up a life that my wife and I had
long dreamed of, in the relative wilds on the outskirts of a Patagonian ski
resort in the Andes Mountains. Though we had actually wanted to make our new
life in an even more remote area,
this was as far away as we could get from civilization and still have access to
at least barely adequate communications.
The Internet (in a timid dial-up version) arrived, only shortly after we
did, through the local electric power cooperative and I was one of the first
customers for it. Before that, I had to send work I did for a magazine, a news
agency or other publishing operations via fax, first through a telephone exchange
five miles away and, a little later,
from my own mountain home, after a long, uphill battle with the phone
company—that convincingly reached the office of its president in Buenos Aires,
a thousand miles away—until they finally agreed to put up twenty-five posts and
string cable over a mile in from the highway along a twisting, climbing
mountain lane to my cabin.
So it wasn’t like I was a nerdy Internet enthusiast. On the contrary, everything
I learned, and continue to learn, about life on line is basically intuitive and
via trial and error, since I have never been able to muster the interest or
wherewithal to sit through any sort of course on computing, cybernetics, apps
or the Internet per sé. For me, all
of that is merely a tool—if an absolutely marvelous one—for sharing my work and
my writing with my clients and with the world. And were it not a matter of
necessity, I would surely still be writing this on one of several sturdy desk
model manual typewriters that I’ve owned over the years.
For another thing, I had no knowledge whatsoever of the effectiveness of
the social media in getting out the word about what you’re doing. The fact is
that I only joined Facebook and then started a blog to placate a New York
writer friend with whom I had worked in Buenos Aires, who was trying to help me
find a literary agent and/or publisher for my fiction and non-fiction creative
work. His point was a valid one: namely, that I would have to be a really
egocentric ninny to think that anyone would remember my days as a Buenos Aires
editor, columnist and foreign correspondent when I hadn’t had any serious
visibility in the mainstream media for over a decade and a half. Blogging and
Facebook were, he insisted, good tools for rebuilding my writing reputation
after years of anonymous editing, research and translating.
So, applying a strategy called “controlled folly”, as suggested by
brilliant if controversial writer Carlos Castaneda, I set out to write a blog,
and the first article was on the subject of precisely the question I’d been
wrestling with: Why blog? (http://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com.ar/2008/07/so-why-blog.html)
My answer, sifted through Castaneda’s sieve
of the ridiculous, was the same as that of John Updike, who was quoted in that
first entry: Why not?
At first, it was just a matter of getting the material out there. Having
a blog gave me an “excuse” to write for myself instead just for hire. It
challenged me to come up not only with new topics, new angles, new creative
ideas, but also to revisit old memories and issues that had haunted me for
years. It further challenged me to dig long lost manuscripts out of their
hiding places in drawers, closets and disused briefcases and re-read them with
a judiciously self-critical eye to see whether they were truly the serious
works I’d thought they were when I wrote them or if they were, in the end, no
more than random doodles of little or no value.
And so I started publishing. At first, practically no one read my blog.
But I was also learning the ropes of communicating through Facebook and once I
figured out how to post a link to the blog, things started looking up. Having
written, back in the day, for a daily paper with a readership in the tens of
thousands, and having been a stringer for major mass circulation newspapers and
magazines in the US and Britain, the paltry early results of blogging seemed
hardly worth the effort. But like a novice writer, despite a thirty-five-year
career as a wordsmith, I found myself beaming when I would check my stats and
see that a piece in my blog had gotten fifty or sixty hits. And when I started
getting my first comments from readers, I was ecstatic. Why? Because this was
all mine—the ideas, the words, the medium, the writing and, above all, the
readers.
In short, I just want to say a heartfelt “thank you” to all of you for
reading me, for identifying with what I write, for telling me how you feel both
here and in Facebook, for taking the trouble to register as regular Followers
of this blog, and for giving me the key element every writer needs to keep
turning out stories and ideas: a faithful and responsive readership.
Many thanks, and I’ll see you here every 13th and 27th
from now on.
