And I Find It Ever So Slightly Worrying
Introduction
Last December (2022) I published (slightly early) by thousandth Vocal post which you can read here.
Now that had taken me 21 months to do so I expected to hit two thousand posts towards the end of December 2024, but, here’s the problem.
The Problem
I have difficulty when creators post lots of stories simultaneously. The haiku and microfiction challenges exacerbated this so much that I had to unsubscribe from some creators because their posts just flooded by Vocal notifications. This is a problem with the Vocal mechanism, not the creators because we already have a feed of subscription stories on our subscription feed. I raised this with Vocal and their solution was to add the unnecessary latest stories feed. Each community has a latest stories feed which is more focused, but putting them all together was deemed a necessity.
Anyway less of that, sometimes I wonder what to do when you hit a goal. Seven Days In just hit a million visits after fifteen years, that was a great feeling but I now only want to hit a hundred thousand visits this month and then I am not too bothered. I think most of the visits are actually robots from Singapore. At this moment in time, it has had 1.03m visits with 91K so far this month, but because the robots don’t click through and buy stuff it doesn’t make me any money (£2 last month for 97K visits).
The Actual Problem
If I were to post three stories a day (this is my third one today) then I could hit my two thousandth pose by New Year’s Eve 2023.
This issue is that I would feel that I would be flooding some people’s feeds and that may result in people dropping their subscriptions to me.
I also am not sure I could mechanically keep up three posts a day for that long, and also I want my focus to be the writing I do, not the number of posts that I publish. If it becomes about hitting targets (number of Vocal stories) then I would feel that I am little better than a spammer, and I could not live with that.
I sometimes post more than three a day, but that is an exception, and generally, two a day is my norm (although it may seem like more) but I don’t write to hit targets, but I do keep an eye out for milestones as I documented in this recent Top Story.
You may have noticed that I also do a lot of self-referencing when I write pieces like this, one of the reasons is so that people can see what I am talking about and the other is the nefarious trick of getting people to jump down the rabbit hole of my writing.
So Where Am I At?
To be honest I am not sure. I will write and publish when I am inspired and I feel like it but I am certainly not going to try and hit two thousand Vocal stories before we see the year out. If it happens then that’s fine, if it happens in 2024 that’s fine as well.
People have been really nice about me hitting fifteen hundred stories as they were when I hit a thousand stories.
I don’t feel writing so many stories makes me special, because it is in everyone’s grasp, but I am happy to have written so much. There are six hundred poems so at a rough estimate that is sixty thousand words and the nine hundred and eight other pieces clock in at about five hundred and forty thousand words so overall I have point six of a million words on Vocal. I doubt I will notice my millionth word on Vocal but if I do I will let you know.
Thank you for reading and listening to my problems.