Centenary
Wherein I hit triple digits
I’ve been writing downhill for the past several days, in service of arriving at today’s episode, which is my 100th post on Substack!
First and foremost, I’d like to thank all of you who read my writing here. It means a great deal to me; there’s only so much writing that I’m motivated to do if I’m the only person reading it. I was chatting this week with someone about the site and how it’s helped me envision the writing I’ve done here as a viable, coherent project. It may sound silly coming from someone who’s written a book and a slew of articles, papers, and chapters, but the fact is that the writing life can be isolating (as just about every writer can tell you). It’s made an immeasurable difference to know that there are people on the other side of these posts. So again, thank you.
My Secret Project
Thinking about how I wanted to celebrate my 100th post, I visited my About page and had a chuckle over how understated it seems now, a year and a half after I started up here. So one of the things I’ll probably do soon is revise it and more faithfully represent what I’m trying to accomplish. But it would have seemed anticlimactic to mark my 100th post with a vague promise to rewrite a page that most people won’t read more than once or twice.
Then I considered my site stats. I was the very first subscriber to my site, in part so that I could see how my emails were formatting, but also so that my subscriber count wasn’t sitting at zero. I’ve been saving and archiving my posts in GMail since I began (that’s how I knew that I was approaching my hundredth post). It occurred to me, when I realized this, that I could be doing more in terms of tracking myself. Substack does provide a dashboard of information, but it tracks engagement (subscribers, views, traffic, etc.) rather than the writing itself. In my writing group, I’ve gotten into the habit of copy/pasting my day’s output into Word, so that I can do a quick word count on it and provide myself with a quick glimpse of my productivity. But I haven’t been saving that data (or collecting it on the completed posts themselves).
I thought to myself, why not? So this week, I set up a spreadsheet, with columns for my post titles, their publication date, and the word count. 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. (Before I publish this post, I’ll add it to my spreadsheet so that I have data on all 100 entries.)
This is how I’m able to tell you that, if you’ve been reading my site since the beginning, you have read (approximately) 135,935 words. The number of words per double-spaced page will depend on font, margins, etc., but my general rule of thumb is 333 words per page (1000 words = 3 pages, in other words, which makes it easier to estimate), and that comes out to a shade over 400 pages worth of Substack entries.
But that’s not all! I’ve got charts! This first one is just a graph of all of my posts chronologically from left to right, with word count on the y-axis.
This made it easier to locate my 5 longest entries (though I could also have just sorted the spreadsheet by my words column):
FOMO Economicus, concluded (3042 words)
Approximity (2834 words)
Double Entendre (2708 words)
Takedowns on the uptick? (2686 words)
Ad bellum proliferandum (2301 words)
As I was admiring this chart, I realized that it was a bit misleading, because it didn’t accurately capture the publication rhythm of the past 18 months. Sometimes (like this week), I’ll post a few entries in rapid succession, especially in multi-part series; other times, a week or more may pass by between posts. What’s missing from this graph, then, is an actual calendar, as opposed to a list of dates. So I opened up another sheet, to track my monthly output by the number of posts.
My first entry would be at 12:00 on the clock face, and then you can move around the circle clockwise to see the chronology. You might notice that, in the past 6 months, I’ve written as many posts as I did in the first full year of the site, even given my early enthusiasm. I was also struck by the difference between spring semester last year (4 posts in February, March, and April combined) and this year (many, many more). Here’s a more traditional version of this graph, with columns, that makes the difference pretty clear:
As you might expect, this productivity chart maps pretty closely across the site traffic map that Substack provides:
Finally, the numbers themselves change as I link to older posts, so these are just based upon my most recent data, but according to Substack, these have been my 5 most viewed posts:
As you might gather, the views tend to creep up as I go along, as more people subscribe, and as I’ve built out a body of essays. All 5 of my top posts are from the 2nd half of the 18 months I’ve been writing here.
There’s more that I could probably do, but that’s all I’ve got handy, without spending a lot more time on the spreadsheets. Oh, and I mentioned last post that I’d included a hint about today’s installment. Before I had any clue what I was going to write about, I’d decided to include the phrase “I see” in the title, because IC is one way of writing 99 in Roman numerals1 (and a lot easier to include than whatever XCIX would look like). I did say that it was pretty obscure. It was either that, riffing off of “99 Luftballons,” or including a picture of Barbara Feldon from Get Smart, and those last two felt a bit obvious to me…
One last time, thanks for sticking around, and here’s to the next 100…
I’ve always loved Roman numerals. My original blog had posts celebrating my 100th (C), 500th (D), and 1000th (M) entries.