Category: State of the Blog

State of the Blog — November 2025

My “State of the Blog” posts are something I’ve been doing since the start of Words Deferred. Back when I was posting more frequently, I’d write these every six months. In 2024, I decided to switch to a yearly cadence—and now I dropped the ball and I’m two months late.

Previous Posts

Metrics

  • Years Blogging: 5
  • Total Posts: ~550
  • WordPress Subscribers: 159
  • Monthly Views: 760 (avg. over last 3 months)

Noteworthy numbers in the past year include the all-time view count hitting 20,000, and highest daily views hitting 213.

The 2024 Slump

Words Deferred has never been “big,” but the stats showed steady growth from 2020-2023. During that first couple years I posted quite a lot, aided by projects like Razor Mountain and journaling through NaNoWriMo, where my fiction writing time and blogging were tightly intertwined. I was also trying a lot of different ideas, still figuring out what exactly I wanted this website to be.

In 2024, I embarked on my Year of Short Stories, where I focused on writing, editing, and submitting short stories. That was a great experience, radically increasing my comfort level with all aspects of writing and submitting work, and I also got some of my work published, which is nice.

That project set me up for one weekly post documenting my progress and submissions. My other posts were less frequent, and ultimately the blog was quieter than previous years. The Year of Short Stories was a project that took most of my writing time and energy, and since I was planning to submit the stories I was writing, I couldn’t use those as content. I also suspect that my weekly updates were less likely to draw in readers from week to week in the same way that something like Razor Mountain’s ongoing story might.

Whatever factors contributed, 2024 was the first year since the start of the blog where I saw the metrics go down—a roughly 30% drop from 2023. I generally try not to pay too much attention to the numbers (outside of these retrospective posts), but I’ll admit that a drop like that is a little disheartening. It begs the question, “have I already peaked?” It’s a lot easier to ignore the relatively low view counts when they’re at least going up every year.

2025: The Year of…Nothing in Particular?

As 2025 rolled around, I found myself once again at the crossroads where I’d finished another writing/blogging project, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next. Over the years, I’ve learned that I work most effectively when I have some big project like this to focus on. I think it also makes for good bloggery when there’s a big project to talk about week after week. Documenting those writing projects helps me get through them, and hopefully provides something interesting to post. When I don’t have a long-term focus, I tend to flail around and procrastinate.

Going into this year, I was burned out on short stories. For lack of a better idea, I decided to try tackling a different project each month. What were those projects going to be? I didn’t really know.

For January, I picked an easy one: write a page per day. No problem. I’ve probably done ten NaNoWriMos, at least half of them successful, and this was a much easier version of that. I finished first drafts of two short stories, and even wrote some goofy fan-fiction for a game I was playing at the time, something I’ve never done before.

Then February hit, and I stalled out hard. I had several completed drafts sitting around, and I’d been struggling to find the motivation to revise them. I figured that would be a good goal, but I never really picked out a particular metric to hold myself to.

Then I was sick for a few days. The kids were sick for a few days. School activities started and I ended up being a mentor/coach. We had some family medical issues. Before I knew it, my plans were long-abandoned. I ended up having more than one month in 2025 where I didn’t post anything, and I wasn’t writing much outside the blog either.

It’s never been hard for me to find reasons not to write—hence the name of the site—but the first half of 2025 was chock full of them. Without a big, clear, overarching project to keep me going, I dropped off the map for a while.

Second Wind

Looking back, I didn’t really get my feet under me, writing-wise, until summer. The kids finished school for the year, activities were over, and the medical issues were mostly resolved.

I spiffed up the blog layout ever so slightly, added Recommendations and Support Me pages, and took stock of my recurring post formats. Now that I’m into year five of Words Deferred, I’ve found a few formats that I enjoy writing and can keep coming back to:

The articles I most enjoy writing are still those that dig into the art and craft of writing, from brainstorming to revision to publishing trends. And while I enjoy having a big project to work on throughout the year, I found that I can lean on these recurring series to have something interesting to write about at least once a week, and keep my pen to the paper.

Oddly enough, my number of posts published in 2025 will probably work out similarly to 2024, maybe even a little less, thanks to how little I was writing through June. However, my views have been rising steadily ever since then, and I’m already getting way more eyeballs than 2024. Will I hit beat the 2023 peak? I don’t think so, but it’s looking more possible.

SEO for Dummies

Are there some sort of lessons to be learned about search engines and keywords and maximizing internet points in all this? Probably. The only reason I noticed my views were going up again was because WordPress sent me a little notice to say “Hey, we were surprised to see some people are reading what you wrote.” So I looked at the “Insights” tab on my dashboard, and that only confused me more.

The only app I automatically share posts on is Bluesky. In previous years, I used to share on TwiXter, back before the bots and assholes took over and they shut down the socialist blog-posting APIs in favor of their glorious, free-market, All-American blue checkmarks. So of course it makes sense that WordPress tells me I got about 6,000 shares each on Facebook, X, Reddit and Tumblr, where I never post anything.

I don’t know how this is possible. If you’re sharing my posts on Facebook and Tumblr, please reach out and clear this up for me.

And what exactly is a “share?” Clearly not the same as a “view.” Maybe a “glance?” But then, when people read my articles through the email subscription, that doesn’t count as a view either. Google also sends me monthly search statistics that appear to wildly overestimate just how much traffic they’re sending my way. They use the even more vague term “impressions.” I can only assume an “impression” according to Google means that my website was on page 10 of the search results when someone skimmed the AI overview.

I checked the WP and Google search insights. I seem to be coming up in roughly the same searches as I have been for years. I found out that I’m cited in the Wikipedia article for “Mystery Box.” That’s kind of fun, and apparently counted for 3 whole clicks. Who is clicking that? ChatGPT helpfully sent seven people my way. Why? Maybe they asked it why people hate LOST so much.

In conclusion, the internet is a unfathomable beast. It giveth and it taketh away. None can know its true heart, and those who claim to do so are false prophets.

What’s Next?

I’m itching for another big project. But when I say “big,” that might just mean The Year of Even More Short Stories. Whatever it is, it’ll be intermingled with the usual things, the Read Reports and Story Idea Vaults and random game and TTRPG musings, and maybe even another poem.

Let’s all just try to make it to the end of the year, and then we’ll see where 2026 takes us.

State of the Blog — Aug 2024

Amazingly, it has been almost four years since I started this blog. It has become such a part of my life that I have a hard time remembering the days when I didn’t send my thoughts out to the internet on a semi-weekly basis.

I strive to document my process, if only for the curiosity of other writers—from my Razor Mountain project documenting the first draft of a novel, to my NaNoWriMo series, to my current series where I’m spending the year writing and submitting short fiction.

My “State of the Blog” posts document the blog itself. I used to do these every six months, but I switched to a yearly schedule in 2023.

Previous Posts

Metrics

  • Years blogging: 4
  • Total posts: 473
  • Total followers: 149
  • Monthly views: 299 (average over last 3 months)

The Year of Short Stories…and Less Blogging

The fairly obvious narrative when comparing the stats to 2023 is that the blog has slowed down considerably. In my first three years, I averaged 126 posts per year, which is about 2.5 posts per week. This year, I produced only 95 posts, or 1.8 posts per week, and the daily posts during last year’s NaNoWriMo even skew that a bit higher compared to the rest of the year. Sheer posting volume isn’t the be-all, end-all for a blog, but it does have an impact. All other things being equal, more posts make the stats go up.

I did plan to reduce my post frequency in 2024, although I ended up posting even less than I planned. Part of that was the intrusion of non-writing priorities. I moved to a new house, and my family and day job have kept me plenty busy.

Part of it was that I didn’t have a project like Razor Mountain, which lent itself to frequent posts. My “Year of Short Stories” series was, in some ways, the replacement for my Razor Mountain series, but that’s one post per week and occasionally less.

Another explanation for these statistics is the sort of content I’ve been posting. Razor Mountain (and the NaNoWriMo series, to some extent) had the advantage of an ongoing story to bring readers back on a regular basis, as well as the “development” portions that were more focused on the writing process. I’m very purposely excluding my actual fiction from my “Year of Short Stories” series, because you can’t sell first rights to a story if it’s already been publicly published—even on a blog. I’m writing approximately the same amount, but less of it is blog fodder.

I also don’t expect that “Year of Short Stories” is always the most exciting content for my readership. I hope it provides some value, if only for writers to compare to their own experiences and expectations, but I do it partly for myself. It gives me a record of what I’ve been working on, and motivates me to keep making progress every week.

New Content

Seeing the WordPress graphs go up is not the most important thing in the world, but I would like to feel that I’m providing something interesting for more readers. To that end, I have been thinking about how to spruce up the blog and post more. However, I am still committing the bulk of my writing time to work that isn’t going up on the blog. I think it’s the only way to progress my writing career. So, I want to post more things that readers like. I just don’t want it to take too much time or effort. Easy, right?

My first new experiment is the Story Idea Vault series, which started this past week. I’m excited about this, because I think most writers like prompts and ideas, and these are easy posts to write. I have huge documents full of story ideas, so I could write weekly posts for years without running out. This also gives me a good excuse to do a little brainstorming every week or two, in order to come up with new ideas.

And while I haven’t been posting as much in 2024, I’ve developed a backlog of half-finished posts. I may put a little more time into finishing some of those to give the blog more life. Still, what I would really like to find is another ongoing series that focuses more on the craft side of writing, as these are the type of posts that have mostly been MIA in the past year.

Razor Mountain

I was recently contacted by one of my old beta readers for Razor Mountain, wondering about the status of the story. I was a little sad to tell them that it’s effectively on hiatus.

As much as I enjoyed the experiment of writing a novel in public, the first draft is really only half of the work. To make it the best book it can be, I would need to dedicate months of effort to revision and critique. That would be a nice second act to the Razor Mountain series, and I do think it’s important to shed light on that part of the process. There is depressingly little writing about the struggles of editing and revision (and not just the grammar and copy-editing parts).

Unfortunately, writing Razor Mountain in public means that it would be very difficult to get a traditional agent or publisher interested in it. Unless the blog suddenly blew up and got millions of views, traditional publishing doesn’t want something that people have already seen. And despite my best efforts, I just can’t get myself excited about self-publishing.

I understand, at an intellectual level, that self-pub is a significant chunk of the landscape these days, and that it’s the way that many authors make their careers. Even so, I grew up in the era where traditional publishing was the only game in town, and I still have a certain…romanticism?…bias?…toward trad pub. Could I feel satisfied with a physical copy of my book, if I hadn’t first convinced a jaded, chain-smoking agent and an overworked, sassy editor that the book was worth spending time and money on? I don’t know. Say what you want about my biases, but we all have to follow the path that feels right. For me, that doesn’t include self-publishing, at least for now.

I haven’t given up on properly finishing Razor Mountain, but I won’t be picking it up again in 2024. I’m enjoying writing short fiction and getting involved in all the aspects of writing from idea to submission. It’s fun and satisfying to produce a heap of stories in the time that one novel would take. That doesn’t mean Razor Mountain is dead. It’s sleeping. I just need to figure out how to get excited about it again.

Thanks for Reading!

If you’re one of my regular (or even occasional) readers, know that you’re appreciated. As writers, we’re all throwing words out into the world and hoping that someone will read them. You doing that for me may not feel like much, but it’s nice to be heard.

If you have any thoughts about Words Deferred, or more generally, what you’re looking for or enjoying in blogs, feel free to drop a comment and let me know.

2024 is the Year of Short Stories

Early in the life of this blog, way back in 2020, I made my novel Razor Mountain a main feature. I thought it would be interesting to document the process of writing a book from start to finish, and put it out episodically. This had the added benefit of aligning my blogging with the fiction I wanted to complete. It kept me writing, and kept the blog active. I believe the tech bros call this “leveraging synergies.”

However, all good things come to an end, or at least slow to a crawl. I’m still in the process of revising Razor Mountain, but I’ve found that there just isn’t as much worth writing about in the revision process as there was when I was working toward a first draft.

In November, I participated in NaNoWriMo, and it turned into a similar project almost by accident. I started writing about the process every day, and decided to stick with it for the entire month. The result was an extremely smooth NaNoWriMo experience, where I was able to reflect on what I was writing.

2024

Now, a new year has been released from a secret compartment in the ceiling, and threatens to roll over us like that boulder from Indiana Jones. I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions, but I do have a new goal for the year, which is both simple and difficult: write, edit, and submit as many short stories as possible.

Since it has worked well for me with other projects, I’m going to try blogging my way through this as well. This is self-serving: I want my writing here to encourage me to accomplish my fiction goals. The current plan is to do weekly updates, but I may adjust that depending on how much I have to say.

For each short story, I expect to

  1. Come up with a concept
  2. Write a draft
  3. Revise
  4. Submit to Critters for feedback
  5. Revise again
  6. Find a suitable publication via Duotrope
  7. Submit the story

As usual with the traditional publishing process, rejection is the norm. So once a story is out for submission, it will likely rack up a number of rejections. Even for successful short story authors, this is pretty normal. It’s rough out there.

As with my previous projects, my goal is to provide transparency for the curious. I’ll be honest about my successes and failures, and I expect there to be plenty of failures. But it should be fun, and I have no doubt I’ll learn a lot in the process.

The Short Story Series

As long as we’re talking about short stories, I’ll take a moment to plug my series about writing short stories. I wrote these in mid-2022. I’ve been thinking about a project like this for a while.

State of the Blog — Aug 2023

It’s almost my three-year blogoversary!

Since I started this blog, I’ve done a “State of the Blog” post every six months. This is the sixth such post.

One of the key tenets of this blog is an open writing process. I’ve brought that to my serial novel Razor Mountain with development journals, and I bring it to the blogging process with these posts.

Previous Posts

Metrics

  • Years blogging: 3
  • Total posts: 378
  • Total followers: 137
  • Monthly views: 555 (average over last 3 months)

The Curve Gets Weird

For quite some time, I’ve seen visitors to the blog increase steadily. There might be a month or two where numbers would drop, but they inevitably kept creeping up. In December of 2022, I saw the biggest peak up to that point, as presumably more people who like to read blogs do so when they have some extra vacation time over the holidays.

After that, the graph got weird. Up and down constantly, and not much growth on average. Why? I don’t really know. Maybe I’ve been posting a little less consistently. Not much, but a little.

I have a few regular readers, but more than half of my usual traffic comes from search, and search traffic seems to be more variable these days. I can see why people who obsess over traffic or try to make money at this would get into all the little intricacies of SEO, keywords, etc. It’s strange to see a change in the pattern and not really understand why.

The End of Razor Mountain

Six months ago, I could just barely see the end of Razor Mountain in the distance. This July, I posted the final chapter.

This felt like a turning point for the blog. I’ve been working on Razor Mountain almost since the beginning. Between the actual episodes and the development journals, it accounts for 171 posts, about 45% of the entire blog.

I was so eager to finish the book, I didn’t think that much about what effect it would have on Words Deferred. Sure, I still have to do revisions, but the reality is that it’s going to be a very different blog, now that I’m not posting so much Razor Mountain.

For now, I plan to continue some of my other regular posts—monthly read reports and general writing topics.

Updated Posting Schedule

One of the great things about writing Razor Mountain was that blogging and writing fiction were intermingled. I could do both at the same time. However, as much as I enjoyed the experiment, I plan to write my next novel in private.

As a result, I can’t continue to dedicate so much time to the blog if I want to keep up with my actual writing. As a result, I plan on cutting back. The fact that I’ve been posting 2-3 times per week for so long is shocking to me, considering how challenging it seemed when I first started.

I’m still committed to posting at least once per week, so it’s not like I’ll be disappearing. I have quite a backlog of topics I’d like to write about.

Next Time

Speaking of cutting back—now that I’ve done six of these on a bi-annual basis, I’ll be switching to once-per-year assessments. I still like having this chance to look back at what I’ve done and think about what’s next, but the blog isn’t young and new anymore, and I don’t feel the need to do it quite so frequently.

The next few months will be a change, but hopefully a good one.

Thanks for reading!

State of the Blog — February 2023

It’s that time again. Since I started this blog, I’ve done a “State of the Blog” post every six months. This is the fifth such post.

One of the key tenets of this blog is an open writing process. I’ve brought that to my serial novel, Razor Mountain, with my development journals, and I bring it to the blogging process with these posts. While the Razor Mountain development journals focus mostly on fiction writing, these posts are about blogging in general.

Previous Posts

Metrics

Let’s start with the numbers:

  • Years blogging: 2.5
  • Total Posts: ~315
  • Total Followers: 128
  • Monthly views: 530 (average over last 3 months)

Search vs. Direct Traffic

The split between search traffic and direct traffic has stayed roughly the same in the past few months. Something like 75% of the traffic I get is from search, with one hero post and a handful of other mid-ranked posts capturing most of those views. The remaining 25% looks like it’s mostly from regular readers, and they’re mostly reading my new posts each week. As you’d expect, comments and likes come mostly from the regulars, while views are mostly the drive-by-searchers.

That search engine traffic varies quite a bit from week to week and month to month, so I’m in the odd position where my stats often aren’t driven much by what I posted recently, and instead come down to how many people wandered in from Google.

Slower Growth?

As I looked back at previous six-month windows, I saw fairly consistent growth in numbers. Usually, my views would just about double over the course of six months. The past six months were the first time where that wasn’t really the case. On average, those stats still went up, but not at that exponential rate.

Complicating the issue is that the numbers didn’t show a consistent trend. As you can see from the graph, there were a couple of fairly low months and a very high month. Turns out a lot of people have extra time to catch up on their blogs in the last two weeks of December.

It will be interesting to see what the next six months look like. This just isn’t a ton of data points to infer much from. I’m not really looking to change what I do based on these numbers—I won’t be doing a bunch of SEO stuff or using more clickbait-y titles. I’d love to see the blog keep growing, but if it does it will be because I keep posting what I enjoy posting, and people find it and like it too.

Approaching the End of Razor Mountain

There are ten chapters left in Razor Mountain. That number may change a little as I work through Act III, but that’s still well over 2/3 done. Plus, as an experiment, I already wrote a first draft of the last chapter at the start of the book. So as long as I can keep up my current pace, I should have all my chapters done before my next State of the Blog post.

I’ve been thinking about what happens next. First, I know I’m going to take a break from the book to get a little distance. Then I’ll be rereading and digging into whole-book edits and polish. I worked extra hard on the front-end to make these episodes as good as they could be when they are released, but I know that there will be a lot of opportunities to go back and further improve and tighten the story.

The bigger long-term question is what I want Razor Mountain to be. Right now, it lives on the blog, and on Wattpad and Tapas. I wanted this to be an open experiment, and I’m very happy with how it has gone. But with a rare few exceptions, traditional publishers are not interested in publishing a book that is already out in the world. I may decide to explore self-publishing, just in case there are folks out there who would be willing to throw a few bucks my way for a copy of the final book.

What Lies Beyond

Razor Mountain has been an integral part of my blog almost since its inception. My posting schedule changed when I went from pre-production to actually posting chapters, and it will probably change again when I get into editing. Then, at some point, I’m going to be done with the book, and there will be a big gap to fill in the posting schedule.

I have a few ideas of what I would like to work on next. I would love to spend at least a few months writing nothing but short stories and really grinding submissions to publishers. I also have dreams of writing a TTRPG campaign setting—I know there is a decent chunk of my regulars who are into that sort of thing, and I think it would bring in some new readership as well. I’ve been kicking around ideas for a setting for years, so it would be great to get it out of my head and onto paper.

I hear that people love maps…

Whichever project I choose to do next, it’s very likely that I will end up posting less frequently. I love the blog, and it has been very satisfying to get to a point where I put out at least three posts most weeks, but I also want to produce more fiction and other work that I won’t end up posting to the blog. Since there are only so many words I can produce in a given week, that necessarily means I will end up stealing time from the blog for other projects.

That’s okay. In some ways, I feel like the blog has grown up. It’s no longer a baby blog where I post my thoughts into the void. I have regular readers that I recognize, and writing and blogging friends that I occasionally trade comments with. I don’t want to stop blogging, but I feel like the blog can continue to grow and thrive with a little less care and feeding than I’ve been putting into it so far.

See You Next Time

That’s it for this time. I’ll see you in another six months for the three-year blogoversary!

State of the Blog — Aug 2022

Dang y’all! Somehow it has been two years since I started this blog. It’s honestly hard to believe.

One of the key tenets of this blog is an open writing process. I’ve brought that to my serial novel, Razor Mountain, with my development journals, and I bring it to the blogging process with these “state of the blog” posts every six months or so.

Metrics

  • Years blogging: 2
  • Total Posts: ~250
  • Total Followers: 87
  • Monthly Views: ~375 (average over last 3 months)

I do my best to not worry too much about visitors, views, and all the other bloggy statistics, but I do keep an eye on them. In the past six months, I really have nothing to complain about as far as the graphs and numbers. I don’t pay much attention to the totals. I’m small by most standards. All I really look for is growth, and the blog has been growing steadily. It took until this May to hit 2,000 total views, and a couple weeks ago I hit 3,000 total views.

One Post to Rule Them All?

One interesting statistic that has become apparent over the last few months is that I have a single post that has out-performed all the others, by a considerable margin.

Great Writing — Can You Say Hero? is a post from about a year ago. I had intended to start a series of posts talking about some of my favorite pieces, but I’m distractable, and I’ve never written another of these posts. Views for this post have steadily increased over the past few months, to the point where now they account for about 50% of the views I get every single day!

It’s important to note that I did not intend or expect this. I just wrote a post, and hoped (as I always do) that it would be interesting for others. This particular post hit a search algorithm sweet spot.

You see, there is a steady flow of people looking for Junod’s story about Mr. Rogers, and not very many search results on Google. Because of this, my post shows up near the top of results for several similar searches. This traffic is almost entirely driven by Google.

This is a potent illustration of the power of search engines to drive traffic. This is why people spend so much effort chasing SEO. However, the million dollar question is whether this traffic is actually good for me. I just happen to be capturing views in search of something else. On the other hand, the more people who read the blog, the more likely that some of them will be interested and come back.

The next six months will be interesting, because I’m also seeing search engine-driven traffic on a couple other posts on a much smaller scale. We’ll see if these other posts start to grow in a similar way.

The Long Tail

Even setting aside the search engine traffic, I’ve now reached a point where the post of the day is usually not the primary driver of traffic. On days when I post something new, it is almost always out-performed by a random assortment of my past articles.

This is why so much advice for “content creators” boils down to “keep making a steady stream of new stuff.” On rare occasions, you’ll make an outlier that performs better than most of your other stuff, but you’ll also create a large body of work that collectively draws in a bunch of people over time.

Looking Back and Setting Goals

These six-month reviews are partly about looking back, and partly about re-evaluating what I’m trying to achieve.

Looking back, I feel like I’ve really hit my stride. I have a steady rhythm of alternating weeks: Razor Mountain episodes and a development journal one week, then two writing-related posts and a reblog the following week. Every once in a while I skip a post. I’m not a robot. And I no longer worry about maintaining a perfect schedule.

I usually have a backlog of ideas for posts. Sometimes I do a series on a topic, sometimes I do one-offs. I’ve become a lot more comfortable with off-the-cuff posts and less editing. I’ve also become a lot less stressed about throwing my work onto the internet where everyone can see it. (There will probably always be a little pang of stress about that, but I think that’s probably healthy.)

My goals right now are:

  • Finish Razor Mountain
  • Write a couple of short stories alongside the novel
  • Write more, and especially write more fiction
  • Think about what’s next for the blog after Razor Mountain

See You Next Time

That’s all I’ve got for this two-year blogoversary. Thanks for reading, and we’ll check back in six months.

State of the Blog – Feb 2022

It’s been six months again, and here we are at another “State of the Blog” post.

I write these partly for myself, and partly for other bloggers who are interested in what someone else is experiencing. Part of creating things for other people is about presenting an experience. Assuming you’re not completely cynical and opportunistic, a blog is going to be at least a little personal, but there’s a temptation to put the best version of yourself forward. Unfortunately, that often means that nobody wants to talk about their statistics or their experiences, unless those statistics and experiences paint them in a very positive light.

This blog is largely built around the idea of openly talking about the process of writing, the ups and downs and the unaltered details. The goal of these “State of the Blog” posts is to openly talk about the blog itself, and how I feel it’s going.

Goals

Six months ago, I gave these overarching goals. These all still apply today.

  • To hold myself accountable to a writing schedule
  • To develop an audience of readers
  • To provide something useful to other writers
  • To make connections with other writers

Blogging is the best tool I’ve found so far to keep myself writing on a regular basis. If I don’t write anything else, I am still writing 2-3 blog posts per week. In years past, I have often gone weeks or even months without writing, so this is very positive for me. That said, I still want to be writing more fiction than I am, and I need to figure out more strategies to motivate myself to do that.

Developing an audience is slow going. I think that’s partly because I’m not putting out fiction quickly or consistently, and partly just because it takes time and effort to catch eyeballs, and only a certain percentage of people are going to be interested. I’m continuing to see steady growth, so I’m not too worried about that, but certainly getting more good work out there wouldn’t hurt.

Providing something useful for other writers and making connections with them go hand in hand. Again, based on the statistics, it seems like more and more people are appreciating what I’m posting. I’ve also been working on making connections with other writers who blog regularly and have work that interests me. That’s a slow and tedious process of internet search-an-find, but it is rewarding to discover someone who posts great content, and even better if they like what I’m doing as well.

I have a couple short-term goals for the next six months:

  • Post Razor Mountain chapters more consistently and more frequently
  • Find more great writing blogs to follow

Metrics

  • Years blogging: 1.5
  • Total Posts: ~165
  • Total Followers: 62 (and 9 on Twitter)
  • Monthly Views: ~175 (average over last 3 months)

I try not to put too much stock in statistics, but if I’m honest, it’s hard to not pay a little bit of attention. So I take my data points during these six month intervals. Since this is the third of those intervals, I can start to make some comparisons between those three samples.

The short takeaway is that everything is just about double what it was six months ago. In terms of raw growth, that’s still closer to exponential than linear. It’s slower than it was between the six month mark and the one year mark, but I don’t think that’s terribly relevant when dealing with small numbers. In general, if the lines continue to go up, that translates to more people finding and liking the site.

I crossed the 1,000 view mark in December ’21, after about 15 months of blogging. At the current rate, I’d expect to hit the next thousand by May ’22, five months later. Not huge numbers, but steady improvement.

“Engagement” feels like a gross web business buzzword, but what’s probably more important is that I’ve seen more engagement in likes and comments. Comments are still hard to come by, but that’s to be expected. From what I’ve seen, it’s not uncommon to see anywhere from 25:1 – 100:1 ratios of views to comments. It’s just a lot easier to get people to read what you’ve written than it is to get them to comment on it.

In the next six months, I’d obviously like to see numbers continue to grow, but my biggest indicator of success will be more comments and likes. Feedback is great. Dialogue is even better.

Reblogs

In the past six months, I’ve started doing Wednesday reblogs more frequently. Basically, any week where I don’t post Razor Mountain chapters, I’ll post a Wednesday reblog. I’ll be honest, part of this is that it’s low-effort. I love the blog, but I also limit the time I spend each week on the blog. Hopefully this is a good way to highlight something that I found interesting or useful for other writers, without taking too much time away from other projects.

So…yeah, let me know if you like the reblogs, or if they just clog your feed. I can adjust accordingly.

Razor Mountain

Six months ago, I was still outlining and doing pre-production work on Razor Mountain. Since then, I’ve finished outlining and done all of the book-adjacent tasks like writing the back cover and designing the front cover. I’ve posted five chapters. That’s progress.

I made quick progress initially, then slowed down around the holiday season. Thanks to some real-life factors, I ended up feeling overwhelmed by the schedule I was trying to maintain. I’m now in a more relaxed place, and thinking about trying to push chapters out with a little more frequency.

I do enjoy the cadence of putting out a chapter in 2-3 parts throughout a week, and following it up with a Friday Razor Mountain Development post to talk about the process of writing the chapter. I think it will be interesting to look back on those development journals when the book is done, to see how it has evolved since I first started outlining.

I’m continuing to post chapters to Wattpad and Tapas alongside the blog, but my audience on those platforms is just about nonexistent. It’s understandable since I haven’t put much effort into networking with other writers on those platforms, and I’m not in the more popular genres and styles that I see on their front pages. For now, I’ll keep posting. There’s no point worrying too much about promotion until you have something you really want to promote. At some point when I have more chapters posted (or maybe even the entire book) I’ll dig into those platforms and make a little more effort to draw some attention.

Next Stop: Two Years

I continue to have lots of ideas for stand-alone blog posts and series. I used to worry that I might run out of ideas for a blog, but having written for this long, I’m now confident that I won’t run out any time soon. I have one specific series in the works that I’m excited about—more on that in a week or two.

That’s all I have for now. See you again in six months, for the two-year anniversary of Words Deferred.

State of the Blog — August 2021

Has it been a year already?

In the spirit of being open about my process and progress, I decided to do a State of the Blog post every six months. This gives me a chance to evaluate my work, and hopefully will be helpful to others.

Goals

Why am I blogging?

  • To hold myself accountable to a writing schedule
  • To develop an audience of readers
  • To provide something useful to other writers
  • To make connections with other writers

This is the context that helps me decide how well I’m doing.

I started the blog around August 2020, deep enough into the pandemic to know that it wasn’t going away any time soon. Like many people, I was tired of the dread-induced lethargy, and looking for some creative outlet. I also needed something to help me keep my writing on a schedule; something to keep me accountable.

I didn’t have a plan exactly, but I did have a bunch of ideas. I’ve made vague attempts at blogging before, and they’ve never gone anywhere. This time, I was determined that if I was going to do it, I’d do it properly.

I had the idea of writing a serial novel, released episode by episode. I have a love of writing, and I knew that I enjoy sharing what I’ve learned with others. So before I started, I forced myself to list 100 possible topics for blog posts — to make sure I had enough fodder to keep me posting twice a week for at least a year.

The Metrics

  • Months blogging: ~12
  • Posts: ~85
  • Followers: 29 (and 9 on Twitter)
  • Monthly Views: 93 (average over last 3 months)

These numbers are small. That doesn’t bother me. I’d love to reach a bigger audience, but the important thing is the trend line, and the numbers are steadily growing. I can still get excited when I set a weekly or monthly record in some metric, and right now that’s happening pretty frequently.

Two Posts

After the first few months, I settled into a consistent schedule. On Mondays, I post something about the craft of writing. On Fridays, I post a development journal, where I document my progress on my serial novel, Razor Mountain. I always write my posts early, do a fairly quick editing pass, and schedule them for release.

This basic two-posts-per-week model has worked pretty well. The Monday post provides variety. I can write a Reference Desk post about useful tools, or a post about writing concepts like hooks, conflict, or outlining. Meanwhile, the Friday Razor Mountain posts provide consistency.

Writing these two posts per week also gave me a good baseline for how much time I could devote to the blog. I’m not a full-time writer. I have a day job and other projects keeping me busy. I needed to make sure I wasn’t trying to write more for the blog than I could sustain long-term. Two posts per week was good for me.

Three Posts?

After months of that cadence, I’ve started experimenting with more content. Part of this was finding things that I enjoy posting about, and that readers would enjoy reading. Part of it was finding ways to avoid dramatically increasing the time I spent writing for the blog each week.

I’ve decided to add a Wednesday post to my weekly schedule. I set myself a rule that I can’t spend more than an hour on a Wednesday post. These posts can be shorter and/or sillier than my other posts. I’m also trying to tie them into my other writing projects. Some examples of these Wednesday posts are my series on Twitter microfiction and my “ground-breaking” Writing RPG™.

I still consider the Wednesday post optional. I may skip it sometimes.

The Future

My biggest goal right now is to finish outlining and prep for Razor Mountain. Once that’s done, my posting schedule will probably change again. I still plan to post weekly development journals to talk about the writing process, but I’ll also be posting the actual chapters/episodes.

Being an inveterate planner, I will be writing chapters ahead of my posting schedule, so I have time for beta reader critique and revision. I plan to post episodes on other services as well, and I’ll be going into the details of that process.

I’m also working on interacting more with other bloggers. As a classic writer introvert, it takes a bit of effort to overcome the imposter syndrome and convince myself to comment on other blogs, even when I think I have something to contribute.

I’m also trying to reblog more of the good writing craft posts that I see, especially on days when I don’t have my own content scheduled. It took me a few months to find a decent list of WordPress blogs in my wheelhouse, but now I’m regularly seeing post in my feed that are worth sharing.

Next Stop

I’ll see you back here in six months, for the 1.5 year blogiversary!

State of the Blog – February 2021

This is something I’m going to start doing periodically, maybe a couple times per year. I want to reflect a little bit on what I’ve done, look forward at what I’m planning, and try to evaluate what’s working and what I want to change.

When I started this blog, I knew I wanted to write posts about craft, and I knew I wanted to post serialized fiction. I also had the vague idea that I’d like to document the process of writing as I do it. Beyond that, I decided I would figure it out as I went along.

Metrics

  • My first posts were in September, so the blog is about 6 months old.
  • I’ve made about 25 posts.
  • My readership is still quite small: less than 10 followers, averaging 1-2 views per day.

When I started, I had no particular schedule or planned topics, and my posts were pretty sparse and spread out. However, over the first couple months, I realized that I wasn’t very interested in journal-style posts. I like discussing the craft of writing, and if I’m going to do that I want to focus on a topic and dig into it.

Although I knew that I wanted to post serial fiction, I didn’t have a story ready to go. Some serial fiction writers advocated jumping right in blind. Others suggested finishing the whole thing before posting. Part of what I wanted from serial fiction was posting chapters as they were written, but I’m a prepper, and I didn’t think I’d be putting out my best work if I didn’t plan it out carefully. Between my day job, family, and other hobbies, it was going to be a while before I was ready to start posting chapters. Rather than quietly working for months in the background, this seemed like a good opportunity to document the process, as I was brainstorming and outlining.

Around December, all of this solidified into a posting schedule: two posts per week, with craft-focused or variety posts on Mondays and development journals for my serial writing project on Fridays.

I also began to write my posts ahead of time and schedule them. This allows me to post at consistent times of the week, even though I grab little chunks of writing time throughout the week. It also allows me to build up a buffer of scheduled posts. If something prevents me from writing for a week or two, or I just want a vacation, the blog keeps on trucking.

I’m currently keeping a buffer of about four posts (two weeks with the current schedule), but I’d like to get a full month ahead – about eight posts. As I get to that point, I may begin to introduce some smaller, ad-hoc mid-week posts. However, I’m ramping up slowly to avoid burn-out.

When I start posting chapters of Razor Mountain, they’ll take over the Friday slot. I expect to still write weekly development journals, but they’ll probably be much shorter when I’m already posting the chapter that resulted from that work.

Bloggery, Community and Readership

At this point, I’m relatively content to write for myself and send my bottled messages into the vast sea of the internet. In the long term, I’m not interested in writing only for myself. I want to grow my readership over time and get my writing in front of a larger audience.

A common refrain among content creators is that there are three main contributors to success:

  1. High-quality, original content
  2. Consistency
  3. Luck

The content is what I already spend the majority of my time on. I’ve got a consistent schedule, and plans to slowly expand that over time. And there’s not much to do about luck.

Beyond that, I’m looking at small ways to catch more eyeballs. I’ve read a bit about SEO and the interaction of WordPress tags and categories. I created a Twitter account (@DeferredWords) and set up automatic tweets for my new posts. I’ve also been finding and following other WordPress blogs to get a reader view full of good posts.

I’m probably not going to connect to other social media. Twitter is the only app I use with any regularity, and I don’t particularly want to support Facebook/Instagram.

Some community-building and cross-pollination will happen naturally through my comments on other blogs and my tweets and retweets. Some will come from search engines as I tweak my tags and categories and just continue to post on more topics.

Looking forward, I know I still have more work to do on site layout. I’ll be expanding the menu and possibly adding a few more widgets to make navigation easier and point readers to what I consider my best content.

Fiction

I want this blog to be my writing home on the web. However, I’m also planning to cross-post new chapters of my serial fiction elsewhere. Posting in multiple places adds more busywork, but it also gives me the opportunity to get more eyeballs on my work. WordPress is great, but it’s not necessarily the best place to gain visibility for fiction.

Right now, I plan to cross-post to Wattpad. This seems like the one of the largest open venues for serial fiction around today. It’s available on big and little screens, and it’s got a slick interface. I’m also thinking about Tapas for similar reasons. Tapas seems a little more focused on comics than novels, but still a good spot for serial fiction.

I’ve looked at a variety of other options. There are a few sites dedicated to fiction, and even serial fiction specifically, but some look pretty rough, and generally don’t seem to reach a very large audience.

There is some side work that I’ll have to do for these platforms as I get closer to actually publishing. I’ll need to write up things like an author bio and back-cover blurb, and I’ll have to come up with (or commission) a book cover.

To Be Continued

So far, the state of the blog is “small, but making progress.” There’s obviously room to improve. I’d love to have more content, but I’m happy to ramp that up slowly over time. There are design improvements to be made, but I’ll work on those bit by bit as well. I want my main focus to be consistent, quality content right now.

I think I’ll probably do another one of these around mid-summer. By then, I’ll be posting Razor Mountain chapters weekly. I’m excited to see how things are going in six months!