History Maker Malfunction

I may have miscalculated just how much words matter, at least words that have time, research, and thought behind them.

Back in January, I launched what I had hoped would be a weekly exercise in presenting history, most notably people and events that currently receive short shrift, or have been the subject of some recent revisionism.

This was not an insignificant undertaking, as trying to post something that I considered substantive, and not a mere rehash of someone else's work, required considerable effort.

Each one of the 10 posts that became History Maker Mondays involved reading, research, and then the requisite time necessary to put the information into a readable format. What I thought might become a boost to my site's traffic, for whatever reason, has instead resulted in a decrease in readership.

Despite the drag my takes on history have become to Words Matter, I don't consider these exercises in research and information retrieval to have been total waste of time. Each one of my weekly forays back into the past have helped me to have a better understanding, and further cemented my belief that history is important. It also reinforces my belief that much of what remains important to me puts me in the place of swimming upstream, against the superficial, and overly simplistic and banal.

My decision to suspend my weekly history posts isn't just about a lack of positive feedback, however. When I set out to try to tackle something substantive, in January, I was looking for a way to prime my creative pump, and possibly push my writing forward, hoping it would allow me to fall into book project mode. I think it may have had its desired effect.

While I'm not abandoning the Words Matter ship entirely, I've experienced a noticeable shift in my interests of late. Typically, this blog has been about my views on politics, culture, media, with other subjects tossed into the mix (including history). While I still maintain an interest in these matters, I've become aware of the day-to-day drain on my psyche that these subjects engender. Instead, I'm choosing to focus more on books, reading, the craft of writing, and because of this, a literary focus has emerged.

For the short-term at least, I'll probably post infrequently here, preferring to concentrate on books, other authors, and the progress I'm making towards developing book #3. You can find these musings over at my writing blog.