4/9/24
I sometimes wonder why I keep writing away on these projects without having a strong audience and potential for growth. The answer says more about my psychological needs than any career-centered publishing strategy.
It might help to go back to the start. Up to around 2009, the primary way that I discussed the ideas that were important to me was through an email chain with two close friends that had been running uninterrupted for eight years. But that chain was disrupted.
Getting into the details of that requires giving more information about the relationship with my long-term partner at the time than I'm comfortable sharing publicly. All I can say is that my ability to share private thoughts and feelings through electronic communications, not just with these friends, but essentially with everyone, was terminated. It was an extremely isolating feeling for me, I felt like I lost the right to think, feel and share.
Out of this feeling of isolation the Montaigne Project emerged. I found a way to filter personal experiences publicly into a form that was about another writer and the subjects he raised, but was also about me and what I was going through at the time. And if I understood that this is what the Montaigne Project was really about, perhaps I could have just continued with it and grown what was a fairly healthy audience for a somewhat esoteric topic.
But my ego took over and saw this project as a way to launch a publishing career. And it nearly worked. I found an excellent literary agent and had some very close calls with major publishing houses, but in the end, the project collected a nice stack of very lovely rejections. So I stopped writing about Montaigne and started to look for other more commercial ways to get published.
This diverted me into ghostwriting projects, which were fine and provided me a little extra income from time to time, but didn't really lead anywhere fulfilling. And occasionally I considered ways to revive the Montaigne Project and perhaps do it all again from scratch. I even drew the attention of a popular philosophy podcast in the mid-2010s and had a very nice subscriber bump for a short period, but I just couldn't find a way to relaunch what I'd already spent so much energy producing the first time around. I filled up this creative space by focusing on music.
It took the pandemic for me to finally feel a need to return to the Montaigne Project with greater focus and energy. It happened to hit me at a time when I was going through a great deal of personal turmoil. That long-term relationship that clamped down on my privacy was coming to an end and the blog became deeply personal, veering away from Montaigne. It was also starting to pick a decent amount of traffic.
Around this time, I started to become very focused – too focused, actually – on that traffic. I was overly concerned with who was reading this very personal material. This led to all kinds of house-of-mirrors weirdness for me, trying to analyze my Google Analytics data to determine if certain people were reading. I wrote about this occasionally as well because I thought full disclosure was in order – if I was looking at the data and anyone thought this could lead to an invasion of their privacy, I wanted them to know so they could take action to protect their identity, whether than meant using a VPN or to stop reading altogether. I now realize, however, that I was also writing a roadmap for anyone who wanted to mindfuck me.
Then, as my marriage was entering its final stages, my blog itself became part of the drama. And I won't go into the details of this either, except to say that my ex-partner admitted at one point of doing certain things to manipulate Google Analytics data and make it seem like some people might be visiting the blog. She refused to elaborate on this, and to this day I don't know what she was doing or if maybe she did nothing but was just bluffing.
Since that time, I have started and stopped the blog multiple times, in the process basically destroying whatever audience I had. I re-did the Montaigne Project from scratch and finished it this time, but I ran the new version on Substack and became so disenchanted with how the project evolved that I not only left Substack, I destroyed everything that I wrote on it. (Fortunately, I was able to recover much of it later.)
So now I'm at the point where I no longer have an identifiable audience. It's also a new era, where people are more privacy aware and many people have figured out how to block Google Analytics from tracking any of their surfing. Or they use a VPN or Apple's Private Relay to make it nearly impossible to tell who is reading at any time. I've reached the point where I don't pay so much attention to the numbers because I know they aren't accurate. There could be many more people reading the blog than I can see – and since they've never been inclined to tell me about what they've read or share opinions about it, I just proceed as if anyone and/or no one is reading.
But I still have a bit of privacy paranoia about me. I think all of the years when my devices were hacked has given me some PTSD too. And the whole experience of peeking at the data day by day in 2020 has left behind this curiosity about who is showing up and why.
Because now that it is so easy to hide the places where you surf, there's something more conspicuous about the people who do show up in the data. It's almost like the situation has switched and if you are showing up on Analytics, it's either that you still put no thought into where you surf or you really want to be seen.
This brings me to the final thing that's been on my mind ... the weird data out there that can't be produced by a bot. If you look at any pattern long enough, it will begin to tell a story to you. That's what things like astrology are based on, it's an essential part of the human experience. We want the mysterious to make sense and we keep staring at dots until they one day look like lions and rams and start speaking to us in myths.
From time to time, I see patterns in my data and think, a-ha, this must have been left this way intentionally. But I can never figure out exactly how someone might do it. And then I think, but if this person is doing it, why? What does this person want to communicate by creating this pattern? And then my privacy paranoia kicks in and I wonder if my old privacy nemesis might still be mindfucking me ... but if that were the case, how could she know the information that points to another individual? Is she hacking every device and app I use? Still? Why? And, if that's the case and she took such extreme means, why point this cruel finger towards someone completely innocent?
All of this is a long way of saying, if you are playing a innocent game ... or maybe just doing something routinely as a way of scratching an obsessive-compulsive itch ... and it involves visiting my site and leaving little breadcrumbs that hint at who might be checking me out ... please stop. I welcome you to keep reading, I'm overjoyed that you do, but enough of the drama. Just block your location like a normal person, in a way that doesn't start me thinking.
I ask this because I need a forum like this to express myself and make sense of a chaotic world. Please don't drive me to tear the blog down again and erase it all. I've suffered through too much privacy invasion to handle this alone, I need the help of anyone who means no harm to be on my side with this and not touch off thoughts and memories I want to leave behind.