Bicentenary
On the occasion of my 200th episode
It’s been just over two years since I hit my first milestone on this site: on May 19th, 2024, I posted my 100th episode on Substack. I’ve been aware for a couple of weeks now that I was nearing #200, and even pushed a little harder than normal on the past couple of posts, so that I could sit back, reflect, and celebrate. Happy 200th!
Plus ça change…
One of the most obvious differences between my 100th and 200th posts was the time it took me to arrive at each. I wrote my first 100 posts in roughly a year and a half, from December ‘22 to May ‘24, while my second 100 took almost exactly 2 years. But that doesn’t tell the full story. Two years ago, my site clocked in at roughly 136K words, but it now stands at 327,550. I’ll save you the calculation; that means that my 2nd 100 posts ended up around 192.6K, which is a pretty substantial increase, just over 40% more content. And this bears out when I run a chronological graph of my posts, with word count on the y-axis:
While my posting has slowed down to roughly a weekly schedule, then, I’ve written more during that time. This matches up with my own experience of it, suggesting that I’ve settled pretty solidly into the writing habit that I was looking to recover when I started publishing with Substack. According to the formula I trotted out two years ago (1000 words = 3 pages), if this were a book, you’d be on page 980 right about now. (!!!)
In some ways, my site has become a little less directly transactional, an end in itself rather than a staging area for work that’s happening off-screen. Topically, I feel like I’ve spent more time and effort on both single-episode book reviews and multi-part arcs that are inspired by the work that I’m reading (Scott, McGilchrist, Nguyen, et al., e.g.). I also began using the tools over at bookshop.org to provide a different “index” of my site, like this page that collects all of the books that I’ve officially reviewed here.
I wrote 9 months ago about changing the name of my site, in order to signal a shift in the way that Substack was occupying my personal media ecology, and the turn to Bookshop was part of that. As I explained back then, Bookshop now allows folks to set up online “stores,” and this is mine. I use it mostly for the alternate interface that it provides to this space, but I should also include a reminder that, when I link to a book here, it’s an affiliate link for Bookshop and using it means that a portion of your purchase goes to independent bookstores around the country. I haven’t yet followed through on my promise to expand my shop to include some of my “secret syllabus” content, but that may change soon. I’m going to spend some of my time this summer pre-reading for a graduate course I’m teaching on rhetoric and attention, so I might set up a page there to support that.
…plus c’est la même chose
I’m happy to report that the habits that I inaugurated with episode 100 have continued—I have steadily maintained an ongoing spreadsheet of my writing activity, making it much easier this time around to generate the sorts of reports that I shared two years ago. For example, the bar chart illustrating my monthly output feels like it confirms a pattern (active summer, steady fall, slower winter/spring) that I’ve written about before.
I also reproduced the pie chart that corresponds to my 2nd 100 posts. (We’re getting to the point where the full dataset would exceed the chart’s ability to represent it meaningfully.) You can definitely distinguish my summer activity from the stretch each year where I need to focus on annual assessment responsibilities as Department Chair. (The chart “begins” at 12 o’clock and proceeds chronologically clockwise…)
Last time around, I also included some data about individual posts. In my first 100, there was only a single post that topped 3000 words. There are now 8. That first 3K post, the conclusion of an arc about the economy, is now the sixth-longest, and the only post amongst my top 14 to come from my first 100 (#15 came from August ‘23). The longest piece I’ve written was my rumination from last fall about The Traitors, which came in at 3497 words. There are 2 parts of my Nguyen arc in the top-10, as well as my discussion of Ong, confirming my sense that I’m investing more time into individual posts than I did for those first 100.
When I read back over my 100th post, I came across this embarrassing little tidbit:
It was a pain in the ass, but I went back through the first 99 posts, copied and pasted each one into Word, ran the count, and recorded the info. It was slow going at first, but eventually habit took over and I just ground away at the task until I was done.
At some point during the last two years, I realized that all of this effort was actually unnecessary. A couple of inches away from my cursor as I’m typing this, the Substack interface has two buttons. One of them allows you to access the version history of the post that you’re working on. The other, a circle enclosing a lower-case i, stands for “Post Info” and provides you with data about characters, words, and sentences, as well as reading and speaking time. In other words, that whole rigmarole about copy-pasting my posts into Word? Completely unnecessary. That data was sitting inches away from me the entire time, which is how I know that this entry is currently sitting at 993 words, and will crest over 1000 before I reach the end of this sentence.
Finally, one thing that has certainly persisted across the now-200 entries in this little pocket of an increasingly dead internet is my appreciation for those of you who read and respond to my weekly missives. My audience here has grown slowly and steadily, and I thank you for being part of it. Knowing that I’m not just firing posts off into the ether has helped me re-establish a writing habit, and that in turn has kept me sane while so much else in the world right now feels apocalyptic.
If the pattern holds, I’ll be sharing my next milestone post in the summer of 2028. See you then!