I Am A Publisher

A while back, on another blog, I wrote about the Golden Age of Blogging.

Between 2004 and 2009, you could surf the web and find all sorts of blogs.

Mormon mommy blogs, with super short paragraphs and long, long photo dumps. Blogs run by German high schoolers, where they’d wax poetic about their favorite music — My Chemical Romance, Justice, Tokio Hotel. (Those were the usual suspects.) Blogs that were only created for a class project, only to be abandoned a few months later.

I actually enjoyed those the most. It was fascinating to find a three-to-six-month time frame preserved in amber like that. A digital scrapbook of sorts. I love it!

But … that was then. And this is now.

I have to say, I only got back into long(er) form writing when I started (1) posting essays on Medium, (2) blogging on WordPress again, and (3) writing a monthly Substack newsletter.

I do all of this for fun, by the way. Not for money. Although …

Where’s that Donate button? There’s got to be a Donate button or block or widget that I can insert on here and … Nah. I won’t do it.

This time.

Anyway, I’m not here to give tips on how to make money by writing short little blog posts. I’m just here to say that I only got back into long form writing because of the downfall of Twitter.

Between 2009 and 2023, I wrote roughly 21,000 tweets, most of which I didn’t delete.

I look back now and laugh at this — but when I was 19 or 20, I realized that (like many others before me) I wanted to write a novel. I figured I needed to write around 75,000 words — so I was constantly doing math. 500 words a day, and I’ll be done in just a few months! 100 words a day, and … I can spread this out over the years, right?

No book materialized. Not even a novella. I will say, I kept a 200-word schedule up for about a month or so, which is impressive. I had a 700-day language-learning streak on Drops, which I also eventually quit keeping up with. But other than the streak on Drops, I would have to say that my regular attempts at writing …

Well, it gave me something to be proud of. I was proud that I kept chipping away at it. And I did churn out a lot of words — some of them were pretty good. But there were no novels, no novellas, and no short stories.

I repurposed some of the more colorful descriptions into poems, and I compiled those into a little chapbook. It sounds pretentious — and maybe it is. 🫠 I can see how it might seem pretentious, even though I genuinely love poems and poetry. Even the ol’ epic poetry. But I digress.

I never managed to produce a novel, despite my best attempts at word-counting.

Like counting calories, which can also feel like wasted effort.

When I saw, though, that I’d posted 21,000 tweets, I felt even sillier. There they were — my 75,000 words!

If each tweet were at least six words long — and I’d say many of mine were longer— then I’d have 126,000 words under my belt. A novel and a novella.

I realized — about a month ago, actually, when they were threatening to purge inactive accounts and the accounts of deceased users — that someday, all of those tweets would probably disappear.

So I immediately downloaded my archive and uploaded everything I could to the Internet Archive. It took about a day and a half, but it’s there now. It’s preserved.

Until someone goes after THAT website — Lord, don’t let him try to acquire the Internet Archive! Millions of pages will be taken down overnight. My chest is hurting at the thought of that happening. “OhhhhhhmyyyGodddd, nowayyyeeayyeeeayyyyyyaaaay!”

But … whew. I need to calm myself down right quick. Genuine terror struck my heart. Damn.

In any case, I may never publish a novel — although I am working on writing one. Just for me. Just for fun.

But even if I never publish a novel, I have “published” things online. Forget the quotation marks — we can just drop those. I don’t need to try to qualify what I’m saying here, because this is a blog entry, and not a scholarly paper. I can just be literal, without trying to write defensively.

The Internet has enabled all of us to be publishers. With just a single click, I am my own Simon & Schuster.

Now I am become the Big 1, publisher of words.

I have published tweets. I have published blog posts. I have published newsletters. I have published poems on Wattpad and Archive of Our Own. I have published reviews on Letterboxd and Goodreads. And it only took one click to call myself a publisher.

Someone else is doing the hosting, I realize. But I am the writer, the editor, the marketing department, the sales department, and the publisher.

The sales department is being really lazy, by the way. One of them suggested adding a Donate button to the blog instead of actually trying to sell anything. Can you believe that?!

… I have to go now. I need to add publisher to my LinkedIn.