Larry M. Coleman

On Saturday, June 21, this website turned a year old. I celebrated by going to a beach on Lake Erie and watching the sunset with Shannon on the first day of summer.

It’s been a fun year and along the way, it’s received over 1300 views by almost 800 different people. That means that on average, every day a few people drop by and take a look at something I’ve written.

That might not seem like much when someone on TikTok can post a video and have that many views in the first ten minutes instead of the first year. I’m not worried about that. I’m not trying to “create content,” I’m trying to create value. I’m not here to write something that will be forgotten after ten seconds. If a few people a day come across something I’ve written and it makes them think or it helps them our or makes them feel less alone, I’m happy with that.

This is the 208th post this year and almost 29,000 words. That’s a lot of posting in one year for a site that focuses on quality over quantity. The month of October had a post every day in preparation for NaNoWriMo, but that actually took almost three months of prep work behind the scenes. I wasn’t planning on doing that again this October, not even by re-running 2024’s posts. I don’t want this site to start the slide into the “occasional” re-run that becomes more and more common until there’s almost no new content at all. I’d rather not post anything than re-post something just for the sake of numbers. (That’s exactly what happened in January and February, as I worked on getting the first novel published and started massive work on my 7th novel.)

The site started by recapping my experience at the Yale Writers’ Workshop, but NaNoWriMo’s collapse this March meant that I’d unintentionally chronicled my last NaNo. I didn’t redo Yale this summer because it spurred me to start my master’s at Harvard, and now I’ll never have the chance to do another crazy November of writing. It was a year of highs and sadness.

I like the format that’s developed here. I didn’t start the site with the intention of having a “this day, this; that day, that” layout, but it found it after a while. I save Mondays for writing whatever I feel about that week. On Wednesdays I share a quotation I’ve come across while actually reading, so instead of just copying it into a notebook that no one else will see, I get to show it off to others who might find it interesting or beautiful, too.

Fridays are for a long-form writing prompt/inspiration/analysis, and the weekends are just pure games with dice. I’ve never written flash fiction before, nor have I ever had the desire too, but the Story Cubes weekends have been more fun than I expected.

I’ll continue with that schedule for as long into the future as I can see. I’ll also be doing it here instead of hopping onto Substack like the cool kids are doing. I’ve been around long enough to watch GeoCities be the place everyone had a page. Then MySpace and Tumblr was the place everyone had to be. They collapsed (Tumblr failed so hard even spellcheck doesn’t remember it anymore), only to watch their replacement, Facebook, go from the place everyone had to be only to turn into an over-algorithmed slow-motion burning crash while Twitter simultaneously turned from the place everyone cool hung out into a toxic cesspit of attention-addled and -addling nonsense.

Unless I forget to renew the domain larry-coleman.com ten years from now, I’ll still be right here. I sincerely thank all of you who have come along with me for this first year. Thanks for reading and thanks for one great year!