One Year of highwayscribery

One year ago today highwayscribery launched.

According to Blogger, the scribe has made 277 posts over that time. Some of those are images because for quite some time the staff here could not figure out how to lodge one into the text and so they got their own posts, but the number of posts/articles rests well over 200.

the scribe could get corny and say it was, all this free work, done for you his shadowy sea of unknown and largely unresponsive readers, but he'd be lying like a guilty convict on the chopping block.

Blogging this year has been an unalloyed blast and benefit to a writer who has labored anonymously for years.

Now there's a little less anonymity.

highwayscribery averages 20 hits a day and that does not necessarily translate into 20 actual readers. We know, however, that they are not the same 20 readers and that an audience has taken shape. A small one. By way of contrast, the scribe's friend Antonio Mendoza has a Web site, Mayhem (linked to at left) that gets between 30,000 and 40,000 hits a day!

Nonetheless, the scribe's profile (where it says view my profile next to the pencil portrait), which is essentially empty because it's all in the writing folks, has been viewed over 900 times, which is over 900 times the people interested in his work or profile at this time last year.

So the scribe loves it despite the large amount of work involved. The beauty is that on a day when there's no juice, the scribe can say screw it and he and the world are none the worse for it.

The blog does not get a lot of comments, and that's all that can be said. Maybe the highway scribe's so smart and persuasive that readers are left speechless, convinced beyond a hair of a doubt by the crystalline nature of his sentiments-in-script.

A primary idea was to take journalists to task for their limp wristed approach to the Bush administration, but it became unnecessary because highwayscribery had its own voice, which was therapeutic for the scribe and left him less angry at mainstream journalists and their shortcomings.

You've gotten a nice quantity of labor news you wouldn't see in the daily paper of record. We've given lots of love to the weakened memory of Bobby Kennedy and other worthy progressive icons. We've given weed smokers their day in court, and covered other issues that are ignored or short-shrifted by the big boys.

Literature and poetry also get fair play so that highwayscribery reads something like a variety show magazine, which is how we like it here.

the scribe told himself that the blog had a year's projection and then it would stop. But we're going to keep going for a while because staff here just learned how to make a link without all the html stuff so that he could do things like tell you about his new novel The Sidewalk Smokers Club.

This year we will spend less time bitching about the Bush administration. They will use their crumbling majority to push our country further back into the middle ages, but are mostly done and past their peak.

We hope instead to leverage highwayscribery's newfound prestige (?) by doing interviews with noteworthy people (from an anarcho-syndicalist perspective) and more reporting as opposed to opinionating.

There's a company that binds blogs into books and a year's worth of highwayscribery will make a hefty one. We may do it and put a button beneath "Vedette" so you can all ignore that, too!

Thanks for checking in when you do.