Too Many Posts

A reader emailed me to say:

Dear Jack,

I enjoy reading your blog and have a suggestion to make. You are so prolific that some of your best posts are lost in the midst of the multitude you put up for us to read. Maybe you should slow down and let some stand on their own for a little bit longer.

Keep up the good work,

Yitz

Dear Yitz,

Thank you for your kind words, I do appreciate them. That should sound familiar, it is a standard Jack’s Shack response, but heartfelt. I understand what you are saying and have thought about this a lot.

My words are my children, each post is special to me and each post has some kind of meaning. And I would certainly agree that some of my posts are superior to the others. This is where my real values as a parent and my values as a writer diverge, I love my children equally, but not my posts.

The deal here is that we are venturing into an area of subjectivity in which it is going to be hard to find a consensus on the best or better posts. More importantly, I am writing for me first and for you secondly. It is a bit of a conundrum, because part of me really wants to build a huge readership, be offered a book deal and suddenly be given the opportunity to make this my full time job.

But I would be fooling myself if I wrote for others first and not for me. Some of these posts are painful, they hurt and I do not like to read them again. I spit them out to vent and would not want to hold on to them.

So the question is, what can I do to give my “greatest hits” their due. In theory I could start a spreadsheet and collect the titles/URLS of each, but that is a project that I have yet to undertake. Maybe we’ll see that in the future.

Beyond that I am still a young blogger. A Greatest Hits album should come when I have burned through all of my cash, been to rehab a couple of times, worn out my welcome to the public and am ready and in need of a quick fix through a reunion tour.

-Jack

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