Tag: blogging

• Thoughts on the WordPress.com ‘Starter’ plan

  WordPress.com announced a new ‘Starter’ plan for its users on May 25 after significant backlash from many members of its community of users that a previous price revision had completely disregarded the interests of bloggers – by which I mean those writing to be read and discussed, and not primarily to make money. My own post on the matter blew up on Hacker News and caught the attention of WordPress.com CEO Dave Martin and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg.

  All of it was warranted: the previous price revision eliminated the ‘Personal’, ‘Premium’, ‘Business’ and ‘E-commerce’ plans in favour a single plan that combined all their features into a $15-a-month bundle that, WordPress.com added, users could only pay for 12 months at a time. WordPress.com’s rationale appeared to be that the ‘Pro’ plan was an almost perfect substitute for the ‘Business’ plan but was $10 cheaper.

  But the company management, led by Martin, overlooked a few crucial details in the process: the pricing change was sudden and unannounced, and included an anathematic traffic limit on the free plan (which it removed shortly after); there were no plans between the free and ‘Pro’ plans, forcing even those indifferent towards making money – which was most bloggers including myself – to shell out $180 dollars a year just to add a custom domain; in exchange, these users received a trove of features most of which were useless (e.g. to sell products); and the free plan had its storage decreased by 66%.

  I know “free” doesn’t really mean that when coming from the mouth of an internet platform or provider of internet-related services, but WordPress.com had set up exactly this expectation among its users: that they should never have to pay if they’re on the free plan. Look for Matt Mullenweg saying some version of “we want to democratise publishing on the web” (LMGTFY) and you’ll see what I mean. But it needs to acknowledge that what you get for free is less and less usable. I’m not saying don’t shrink the free plan; I’m saying stop pretending that it’s still just as good.

  Members of the WordPress.com team should in effect stop claiming that they are rooting to improve access to any kind of publishing because the company’s actions on the pricing issue thus far haven’t been the actions of one with that vision. Instead, it should be more honest and recognise the conflict between increasing access to publishing tools and platforms on the one hand and its need to increase its profits on the other, and take cognisance of its apparent struggle to balance these priorities in its products and communicate the changes to its users.

  This brings me back to the new ‘Starter’ plan. It costs $5 a month, also billable only yearly, and has two big changes from its most comparable legacy counterpart, the ‘Personal’ plan: it offers Google Analytics integration and it doesn’t remove ads. The former is confusing because almost none of the people who commented negatively on the WordPress.com post announcing the ‘Pro’ plan and the subsequent forum discussion mentioned wanting access to Google Analytics. The native analytics are pretty good and suffice for bloggers. The latter is more confusing because the ‘Personal’ plan cost $4 a month and removed ads. Why should I pay a dollar more every month and still put up with ads? Unless WordPress.com makes a lot of money through these ads (which I’ve been unable to ascertain with five minutes of googling). The confusion is exacerbated by the fact that most people who wanted a cheaper plan wanted the ability to add a custom domain and to remove ads.

  (Interestingly, WordPress.com has many thousands of blogs lying dormant or unused, all of which also carry ads from WordPress’s WordAds network. If WordPress.com deleted these sites, would their hosting costs drop? Of course, doing so will raise questions about the importance of WordPress.com’s commitment to keeping the sites it hosts online forever.)

  This said, I’m not very particular on this issue, especially after Dave Martin indicated to WPTavern that they need to make more money on subscriptions: “Finding the right balance between the value that we deliver to our customers and the price that we charge in exchange for that value is something that generally has to be iterated towards. We plan to do just that.” Costs are increasing, I understand.

  But I’m still disappointed on three counts:

  1. Importance of monthly pricing – Martin told WPTavern that the company plans to “experiment” with monthly billing, suggesting that it’s no longer on par in terms of importance with the pricing itself. I would have liked to sign up for the ‘Pro’ plan by paying $15 a month to access the ability to add plugins, use premium themes and access the “advanced” SEO and social media tools. This would have been comparable in benefits to managed hosting by Flywheel or LightningBase (no affiliate links), with the bonus that the people who make WordPress also being in charge of my blog’s hosting. But a one-time expense of $180 (or the new India price, Rs 10,800) is not one I can bear, nor, judging by the comments on the ‘Pro’ plan announcement post, most other bloggers who are not in North America or Europe.
  2. India prices – The region-specific price for India for the ‘Starter’ plan is the same as that in NA/EU, and for the ‘Pro’ plan, it hasn’t come down by as much as would be required to make annual payments affordable. I don’t understand how/why the ‘Starter’ plan costs as much in India as it does in NA/EU when the erstwhile ‘Personal’ plan cost 1.5x lower in India – except perhaps if WordPress.com is eyeing big growth in India.
  3. Uncertainty and triumphalism – Martin responded to my post, wrote on the forum and told WPTavern that his team’s communication deserved to be called out. But the ‘Starter’ plan announcement on the WordPress.com blog, which has more than 90 million subscribers, is bereft of any admission of wrong-doing (which Martin spelt out in other fora); together with a triumphalist tone for the announcement itself, issues with the ‘Starter’ plan and no clear roadmap on what comes next (“this was the first of a couple of phases of changes”, Martin told WPTavern), the announcement wasn’t nearly as fulfilling as I expected it to be.

  This brings me to the last and also the most grating issue for me: “we are listening”, both Martin and his support-staff colleagues repeatedly said on the forum, but as one comment pointed out, listening is a passive activity. Listening when people are shouting at you out of frustration, disappointment and confusion is the bare minimum and not a virtue. And it’s because I know WordPress.com can do better that I take the trouble to say that it needs to do better.

  What we wanted, and want, from WordPress.com was/is a constant and intimate awareness of the (not-insubstantial number of) people who don’t give a damn about using WordPress.com to make money but give a big damn about using it to publish posts for the world to read and talk about. We need to know whether WordPress.com intends to maintain this awareness going ahead, and whether it will listen to its bloggers first – as the least common denominators – the next time a big change is around the corner.

  (A similar thing appears to have happened with the proposal of the ‘WordPress performance team’ to make WebP the default image type on hosted sites.)

  2022.05.27

• 2.5 weeks since WP.com’s price revision

  WordPress.com squandered the trust of bloggers it had accrued for almost a decade (approx. since the advent of their Calypso editor) with the decision to introduce the Pro plan the way it did. There were many proclamations – direct and indirect – in between, chiefly by Automattic CEO Matt Maullenweg, about how this trust was important to the company. Now I’ve got to think that the Pro plan rollout was a true reflection of how WordPress.com perceived the trust, and wonder how WordPress.com will treat hobby bloggers in future.

  The most popular request in responses to WordPress.com’s post on its blog and CEO Dave Martin’s post in the forums is that WordPress.com needs to bring back its old plans (which the Pro plan replaced) quite simply because none of the users found them confusing. I tend to agree. Both Martin and Mullenweg have said that WordPress.com created the Pro plan because the old plans were confusing – but considering I’m yet to come across a WordPress.com blogger who feels the same way, I suspect this is something WordPress.com wanted to do to “score the investors a higher multiple”, but which “seems like a move that is incongruent with the mission statement and the strengths of the existing brand” (source). And once they made this decision, they retconned it by claiming that it was what bloggers wanted. I’m glad all the bloggers in the post comments and on the forum spoke up.

  Third, there are some WordPress.com staff members who are periodically encouraging WordPress.com users to keep sharing their feedback as responses on the forum. The WordPress.com blog post also said that they’re listening to users’ feedback, implying that users should keep it coming. I found this heartening at first but now, almost three weeks since the abrupt price change, these calls seem disingenuous. How much feedback does WordPress.com really need to understand the extent to which it screwed up? If it’s a lot, then it would mean the company screwed up big time. (I think this might be a valid concern based on this line in Martin’s forum post {emphasis added}: “We plan to test adding monthly pricing back in, but we don’t have a specific date for this just yet.”) Surely it’s the responsibility of the top management to obviate such a tremendous need for feedback by anticipating what it is that its users want. This also makes me doubt the short surveys that used to appear on the WordPress.com dashboard and what the people running it took away from the responses.

  It’s annoying that WordPress.com staff constantly ask for feedback to be given right now, instead of in the many, many years in which bloggers were happily publishing on the platform. This is exacerbated by the fact that none of the staff members are able to provide a deadline for changes to the Pro plan, which I can only take to mean that the company didn’t anticipate any of these changes.

  2022.04.21

• What are you doing, WordPress.com?

  Be sure to check out the update at the bottom.

  I recently wrote that I’ve stuck with WordPress.com for so long, for all its purported limitations, because its features fully suffice the committed blogger whose content is textual for the most part and because the company behind WordPress.com is running a good business, with the right ideals. (To the uninitiated, here’s an explanation of the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.) But in the last two or three days, WordPress.com has jolted both these beliefs with a surprisingly wide-ranging rejig of its paid plans.

  Earlier, there were five plans: free, personal, premium, business and e-commerce. The free plan came with no custom domain and 3 GB of storage – which is great for people looking to just write and publish and because WordPress.com subdomains had tenancy: it kept them alive even if the blogs at those locations had long died and it didn’t, and still doesn’t, allow people to register a subdomain that used to be owned by someone else and has since been deleted.

  

  But at some point late last week, WordPress replaced all of the paid plans with a single ‘Pro’ plan and reduced the storage on the free plan 6x, from 3 GB to 500 MB. It also imposed a traffic ceiling on both plans where none existed: 10,000 visits a month and 100,000 visits a month (and it hasn’t said anything about overages – so far). As these changes were rolled out to user dashboards over the weekend, many users have also reported that the changes had been imposed on their old blogs as well, whereas the norm is to grandfather old user accounts with preexisting subscriptions (i.e. allowing them to continue on those plans and restricting the new plans to new users). There hasn’t been any official announcement from WordPress.com either about what we’re seeing, whether these users’ experiences are the exceptions or the rules, or anything else.

  With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps we should have seen this coming: the new full-site editing option has rendered premium themes, and thus the premium and business plans redundant; the Gutenberg upgrade allowed users on free as well as personal plans to do some of the things that were previously only possible with premium or business plans. But to be honest, the hindsight doesn’t explain why WordPress.com – whose free plan, pro-open-source stance and focus on making publishing technology more democratic made it many a modern (non-technical) blogger’s host of choice – would pull the rug out like this.

  I for one am particularly bummed because neither the storage space nor the traffic cap on the free plan work for me. The Pro plan currently has only an annual payment option (the older plans had monthly options) and it costs Rs 13,800 a year. I could arrange to spare this much money every year, sure, but it’s a ridiculous amount to pay for WordPress.com’s features – especially those I will really need to use.

  Imagine looking for a good-quality surgical mask to wear in a park but finding out that the most reliable vendor in town has suddenly decided to sell only chemical safety masks. The next-best thing for me to do right now is to find and move to a well-reputed, reliable managed hosting provider, but there’s a reason this wasn’t the best option to begin with, which is what we stand to lose right now: WordPress.com “being there” for bloggers who just want to blog, without being in need of any of the complicated features that businesses seem to need, and WordPress.com being both a good-spirited technology company (unlike, say, Medium or Wix) out there whose prices were entirely reasonable.

  On a related note, I’m also frustrated because WordPress.com had recently reduced its paid plans’ rates for the Indian market. For example, the business plan of old cost around Rs 7,400 a year whereas the new Pro plan, which matches the business plan feature for feature (plus an e-commerce option), costs Rs 13,800 a year, i.e. effectively going from $8.x a month to $180 a year. Again, this may be great for businesses – but it’s a shit move for bloggers. Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, which runs WordPress.com, recently said in an interview: “I’ll tell you a stat most people don’t realize. Half of all users who sign up for WordPress.com every day are there to blog.” I’ll tell you that for all of these people as well as the people who are using WordPress.com to blog (including me), the new plan is a betrayal of our interests.

  Update, April 3, 2022, 7:46 pm: WP.com CEO Dave Martin responded to this blog post after it went big on Hacker News (thanks!) here. Gist: traffic limits based on honour system, region-specific plans en route (vis-à-vis the separate rates in India), à la carte options on free plan coming soon, and communication wasn’t great. I already feel a bit better than when I wrote this post. I’ve also asked Dave to adapt his reply on HN for an update on the WP.com blog – I’ve been checking it regularly for an announcement on the Pro plan and I’m sure others have been as well.

  2022.04.03

• A nominal milestone

  In 2018, I discovered that my blog posts since mid-2014 had taken on a somewhat different character than those before, becoming more critical and paralleling my increasing, and increasingly nagging, questions about what it means to be a journalist – particularly a science journalist – in India at this time. So I reorganised my blog at that point to support this character more, including to truncate the archives at June 2014. And I discovered a short while ago that on this new blog, I have published 1,000 posts. The milestone to me is nominal (references to such round numbers always bring to mind a comment by physicist Kip Thorne, that to celebrate multiples of 10 is mostly to celebrate our choice of a decimal system). This said, it’s gratifying that such a large number of posts have had readers and subscribers – sometimes one, sometimes a few thousands, but never zero. So thank you all for reading along. It means a lot to me. 🙂 Take care.

  2022.02.15

• Reading books, writing words

  It suddenly feels like a lot more people have been reading a lot more books. Or maybe they’re talking about it a lot more. I have one friend who went through more books in 2021 than there were weeks. And I’ve been quite jealous looking at her and others’ Instagram and Twitter feeds about all the great books they read and the places to which the books transported them. I want to go to those places too! But instead of reading books, I just really want to go to those places.

  I lost my ability to read books years ago, probably around the same time, and probably because, I began to read articles, essays and short stories more. I don’t really miss it except when most of the people I generally interact with put their book-reading on display, typically at the end of each year. When I shared this sentiment with my friend, she said I should just give it time and that I’ll get the ability back at some point. Sage, but also unfalsifiable, advice.

  Instead, I’ve found considerable solace – when I’m feeling down vis-à-vis reading books – in the realisation that I may not have read many words in books, but I’ve read many words in probably every other form of the written text than books (excluding social media posts). I launched The Weekly Linklist in July 2020 after an app told me that I’d been reading 12,000 words or so per day on average for at least a year until then. I believe I’ve read many books’ worth of words but just not books per se.

  It’s helpful to frame things this way because the longer I didn’t read a book, the more stigmatising it got in the circles in which I moved and still move. “Oh, you can’t read books? I’m sure you will soon.” Some people implicitly make a virtue of reading books. Reading books is important, no doubt, but I’m wondering if things have got to a point where reading 50,000 words is less important than if they were printed on paper, glued together and published as such.

  Granted, there is value in both presenting and consuming a single argument (used in its broadest sense, such that it encompasses fiction as well), or some non-tenuously related arguments, across tens of thousands of words. But not every argument that’s present this way is good (i.e. there are bad books) nor are shorter arguments inherently inferior. Yet books, and book-reading with them, have accrued a certain prestige that doesn’t attend to, say, essays.

  Then again, it’s entirely possible I’m a frog in a well and there are other wells where frogs talk about all the great essays they read that year, share news articles talking about the same things, whose Instagram pages are replete with screenshots of essay titles, and so forth.

  ---

  I’d originally intended to write a short introduction and then segue to the annual presentation of the number of words I’ve written in the previous year on this blog but the words snowballed. So:

  • I wrote 117,573 words in 2021 on this blog – bringing the cumulative total to 831,826 words.
  • Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series is a little over a million words long. I hope to cross that figure next year.
  • These words were published in 118 posts, which means the average post length was 996 words. I’m happy with this because it continues my trend of writing longer posts on average since 2014 (when it was 665 words).
  • However, I don’t see the length increasing much past 1,000 words because I like my own posts and articles, on The Wire Science, to be that long. And I’m pleased that I’m able to keep track without consciously keeping track (my first and final drafts aren’t very different unless I’ve made a big mistake.)
  • The vast majority of the posts were categorised ‘Analysis’.
  • In the last quarter of 2021, I mostly reacted to things that had happened instead of synthesising insights, and I didn’t like that.
  • I also wrote 127 articles on The Wire Science and The Wire in 2021 – the second-highest in a single year and for the second time in excess of 100 for the same publication. (The highest in both cases was for The Hindu in 2013.)
  • Thus far, I’ve written 845 articles across The Wire Science, The Wire, Scroll, Quartz, Hindustan Times and The Hindu.

  2022.01.01

• 13 years

  I realised some time ago that I completed 13 years of blogging around January or March (archives on this blog go back to March 2012; the older posts are just awful to read today. The month depends on which post I consider to be my first.). Regardless of how bad my writing in this period has been, I consider the unlikely duration of this habit to be one of the few things that I can be, and enjoy being, unabashedly proud of. I’m grateful at this point for two particular groups of people: readers who email notes (of appreciation or criticism) in response to posts and reviewers who go through many of my posts before they’re published. Let me thank the latter by name: Dhiya, Thomas, Madhusudhan, Jahnavi, Nehmat and Shankar. Thomas in particular has been of tremendous help – an engaged interlocutor of the sort that’s hard to find on any day. Thank you all very much!

  2021.04.02

• Ending 2020

  My blogging took a hit this year – as did everything for everyone. I couldn’t publish nearly as much as I’d have liked. While the average post length was the highest it’s ever been – 989 words – and audience engagement was through the roof, I had to just forget many ideas for posts I’d had because I lacked the time and more importantly any creative energy to produce them. Since around May, I felt like writing only on the weekends, and only if an idea or an insight crossed a threshold of interestingness that for some reason kept climbing higher.

  Year	Posts	Words
  2012	119	81,710
  2013	96	71,096
  2014	163	117,302
  2015	209	181,233
  2016	64	55,206
  2017	135	114,737
  2018	184	145,530
  2019	169	136,241
  2020	113	111,752

  That said, I have two takeaways from blogging this year. The first is a minor one – that I’ve published 1,200 posts in all now. I don’t think of this number except at the end of every year; its bigness feels reassuring, and reminds me when I’m down that I haven’t entirely wasted my time.

  The other takeaway is that it’s certainly becoming harder to get through to The Other Side, as their louder commentators clamber further down their rabbit hole, and further persist with argumentative tactics guided not by reason or even the pursuit of common ground but by the need to uphold Hindutva at all times. And as they’ve dug their heels in, I’ve found I’ve been doing the same thing, although not deliberately. I’ve used the first person to refer to positions and the provenance of argumentative tacks more in 2020 than in any other year, and I’ve also been less and less inclined to spell my position – as if I’ve become sub-consciously aware that I’m no longer speaking out to change minds as much as to harden the stances of those who have already expressed solidarity.

  I’m not entirely happy with this shift, this closing of the gates – even if it sounds more productive, as the engagement data also attests – because I don’t know whether when all this tides over, and it will tide over, I will be capable of reopening the gates as swiftly as I might need to. Granted, keeping the gates open even a little bit now – i.e. attempting to reason every now and then with those who aren’t amenable to reason – could prove injurious, but I remain convinced for now that it’s the smaller price to pay. And this is why I think the continuously rising threshold of interestingness is a coping mechanism of sorts, an internally supplied resistance to the hardening of the exterior.

  I’m excited to find out where blogging, writing, reporting, editing, publishing in 2021 will take me – will take us all, in fact.

  2020.12.23

• Tech bloggers and the poverty of style

  I created my writing habit by performing it over a decade (and still continuing). When I first started blogging in 2008, I told myself I would write at least 2,000 words a week. By some conspiracy of circumstances, but particularly my voracious reading habit at the time, I found this target to be quite easy. So it quickly became 5,000, and then 10,000. I kept this pace up well into 2011, when it slowed because I was studying to become a journalist and many of the words I had, to write, were published in places other than my blog. The pace has been more or less the same since then; these days, I manage about 1,000-2,000 words a week.

  At first, I wrote because I wanted to write something. But once it became a habit, writing became one of my ways of knowing, and a core feature of my entire learning process irrespective of the sphere in which it happened. These days, if I don’t write something, I probably won’t remember it and much less learn it. How I think about writing – the process, beginnings and endings, ordering paragraphs, fixing the lengths of sentences, etc. – has also helped me become a better editor (I think; I know I still have a long way to go), especially in terms of quickly assessing what could be subpar about an article and what the author needs to do to fix it.

  But this said, writing is really an art, mostly because there’s no one correct way to do it. An author can craft the same sentence differently to convey different meanings, couched in different spirits; the complement is true, too: an author can convey the same meaning through different sentences. In my view, the ergodicity of writing is constrained only by the language of choice, although a skilled author can still transcend these limitations by combining words and ideas to make better use of the way people think, make memories and perceive meaning.

  This is why I resent a trend among some bloggers – especially people working with Big Tech – to adopt a style of writing that they believe is ‘designed’ to make communication effective. (I call this the ‘Gladwellian style’ because it only reminds me of how Malcolm Gladwell writes: to say what the author is going to say, then to say it, and then to remind the reader of what the author just said.)

  I work in news and I can understand the importance of following a simple set of rules to communicate one’s point as losslessly as possible. But the news space is a well-defined subset of communication more broadly, and in this space, finding at least one way to make your point – and then in fact doing so – is more important than exploring ways to communicate differently, with different effects.

  Many tech bloggers undermine this possibility when they seem to address writing as a science, with a small and finite number of ways to get it right, thus proscribing opportunities to do more than just get one’s point across, with various effects. Writing in their hands is on one hand celebrated as an understated skill that more engineers must master but on the other is almost always wielded as a means to a common end. (Medium is chock-full of such articles.)

  There’s none of the wildness writing is capable of – no variety of voices or no quirky styles on display that an organic and anarchic evolution of the writing habit can so easily produce. Most of it is one contiguous monotonous tonescape, interspersed every now and then with quotes by famous white writers saying something snarky about writing being hard. (Examples here and here.) This uniformity is also reflected in the choice of fonts: except for Medium, almost every blog by a tech person who isn’t sticking to tech uses sans-serif fonts.

  Granted, it’s possible that many of these ‘writers’ have nothing interesting to say, which in turn might make anything but a sombre style seem excessive. It’s also possible some of them are just doing what Silicon Valley tech-bros often do in general: rediscover existing concepts like coherence and clarity, and write about them as if people didn’t know them before. We’ve already seen this with everything from household technology to history. It’s also probably silly to expect the readers of a tech blog to go there looking for anything other than what a fellow techie has to say.

  But I’m uncomfortable with the fact that writing as a habit and writing as an art often lead limited lives in the tech blogging space – so much so that I’m even tempted to diagnose Silicon Valley’s employees’ relationship with writing in terms of the issues we associate with the Silicon Valley culture itself, or even the products they produce.

  2020.11.24

• Ending 2019

  This blog achieved multiple minor but personally enjoyable milestones in 2019:

  • It was read by people in 143 counties, the highest in a single year since 2008 (when I started blogging)
  • It was the second busiest year by traffic (after 2015)
  • It was the year with the highest post engagement (as ‘likes’ on WordPress and shares/comments on Twitter and Facebook)
  • It crossed both 1,000 and 1,100 published posts
  • The number of subscribers breached the 5,600 mark
  • 2019 was my third most productive year by total number of posts (169) and average post length (793 words)

  Year	Posts	Words
  2012	119	81,710
  2013	96	71,096
  2014	163	117,302
  2015	209	182,316
  2016	64	55,206
  2017	135	112,818
  2018	184	144,841
  2019	169	134,092

  Some notes

  1. In 2019, most of what I learnt about writing had to do with straddling the thin line between populist and heterodox writing. Where populism dictates giving the people what they want, and progressively enclosing them deeper within echo chambers, the heterodoxy here refers to giving your readers something they don’t know they want but consume once they discover it. This is harder than it sounds largely because interestingness is a vague goal. Lots of things are interesting, and most people interested in interesting things aren’t interested in all topics. So if I’ve been as productive as I have this year, it’s because I think I got better at identifying what kind of heterodox content Root Privileges‘s readers like and which I also like.

  2. I hit multiple rough patches in my personal as well as professional lives this year, and experienced at least three extended periods of writers’ block brought on by an overwhelming sensation of irrelevance on one occasion, of disgust and world-weariness on the second, and a protracted period of mental illness on the third. While I resent the occurrence of these episodes, I’m also grateful and delighted for having found a way on all of them to get back to the writing habit, one way or another. So if in future I find myself stuck in a similar rut, I will have one more way to motivate myself beyond discovering the specific antidote to the circumstances: to simply tell myself I did it before so I should be able to do it again.

  On that note, I hope you have a great, happier, more productive and more gainful year in 2020!

  2019.12.28

• Fear and delight

  Earlier this week, I published my 1,100th blog post on this site. It hasn’t been a long and great journey because it hasn’t been a journey, per se, at least I haven’t seen it as one. After publishing each blog post, I don’t know if there will be another one in future, nor do I plan in advance. All I know is that when I think of something to write about, I write about it. In fact, each blog post has been a journey – from conceptualisation to publishing – and so 1,100 such journeys together is… what? A meta-journey, perhaps.

  Many of my readers expressed their best wishes and hoped that I would continue writing. In this post, I would like to express gratitude to myself in acknowledgment of a truth that not many know and even fewer understand. The reason I have never been able to plan any of my blog posts ahead is not because I am careless but because I have never been able to fully control my writing habit.

  When an idea strikes, a usually dormant inner self awakens and begins to unpack my bolt from the blue; unlike the conscious self that I (claim to) control and its cluttered internal mind, this inner self draws upon the prowess of an external mind and its own memories, experiences, morals and agency – a mind that manifests almost exclusively when I write, letting me come into a clarity of thought and conviction of purpose that I don’t otherwise possess. Indeed, this ‘super-mind’ vanishes almost as soon as I stop writing (i.e. after clicking ‘Publish’; being in deep thought about how best to articulate an idea between two drafts is also part of the writing process).

  And I fear that one day, this inner self – like all good things – will come to an end for no reason other than to further glorify its own lifetime, and its own mortality. Until then, I must get as much writing done as possible if only because the outer self may never be able to glorify itself for anything other than having harboured the inner one. As The Correspondents sang,

  You’re an addiction pulling me to a grave end
  You’re an enemy who I’m keen to defend
  Down the black hole of my lust I descend
  It’s wrong but I want you tonight

  2019.10.04