Some people call me the space cowboy

I've ben doing a little bit of thinking about my Friday pieces, the ones intended to be funny. I'm not in danger of deciding to stop doing them; I like the exercise and I want to keep writing them. The thing is that nobody tells me that I stink.

That's not just my little masochistic streak showing itself. I want to be a better writer, all around, and better humor writer in particular. I do value the feedback that I get from my faithful readers here, and I do thank each of you for providing it; but I'm also aware that Livejournal, at least the English-language version of it, isn't a growing audience anymore. I haven't got any reason to expect that I'm getting new readers, or any new perspectives in what works and what doesn't. I have to develop my own editorial sense, of course, and trust in that, but I also want to not play too much to a secure audience.

So I'm considering what I might do about it. The obvious thing is to open up a journal, probably on WordPress, and put the weekly pieces out there where there's a more sizable audience and where, the experiences of my mathematics pieces suggest, there's a reasonable chance of new readers coming by and hopefully getting me to write better. Also, at least to my sense of humor, the entires one gets on WordPress by looking for the ``humor'' (or ``humour'') tags are pretty dire, and I could bring up the community average there. At least I'd bring it up by my standards of giggling.

Still, I feel a bit disloyal to Livejournal in thinking about jumping ship, not least since people regularly writing stuff and jumping to other forums is part of what's left Livejournal in its moribund state. (I have much the same problem giving up Usenet.) Of course, Livejournal as a corporation deserves my loyalty as much as my bank or my auto insurance company do; we work together for particular benefits and if either side's not getting that, we can (within the terms of whatever our agreements to work together are) part ways. And they've got my Permanent Account payment either way, along with 3,231 posts I've written so far; they wouldn't have any reason to complain if user number 2,010,200 were to switch the entries one day a week to a link to some more successful blogging platform.

Anyway, I need to ponder and sulk before probably doing nothing.

Trivia: There were an estimated 1,131 strikes in Italy in 1947. Source: Winning The Peace: The Marshall Plan And America's Coming Of Age As A Superpower, Nicolaus Mills.

Currently Reading: The Roads Of Home: Lanes And Legends Of New Jersey, Henry Charlton Beck.