Hello friends,
I'm feeling a little scatterbrained right now, trying to figure out where to put myself on the web. I've started blogging on my own website for the first time in a long time. Not the peppy announcements about convention appearances that hogged the stage for many years, but weird snippets and quotes from books and essays I drafted by never shared publicly for some reason or another. It's new! And weird! And part of me wants to run around yelling that I'm doing it on social media to try and get people to look at it and the other part is like "Hey, guess what, there's no way for you to know who's reading this and that's the best part. BE FREE. DO WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY."
This morning I moved through the quiet ritual of updating The Right Number with a new prompt. I'm a day late this session, but who's counting? Not me, and, judging by the empty call log from yesterday, not anybody else either. Again: I don't really know how people are finding the Number. Robin and I made the website, which I love deeply, but have no stats for. I haven't made a big to-do about posting here (arguably my most engaged audience) every time it updates, because I don't want to overwhelm you all and I guess I also like the idea that the Number is a little hard to find. Tweets about prompt updates often sink without a trace in a timeline that's currently aflame with political anxiety and outrage. But I did make that tiny mailing list/RSS feed that folks can subscribe to if they'd like a reminder when a new prompt goes up, and it seems like about half of the 50-odd subscribers open the prompt every session.
Wait, see? I'm looking at stats again. I don't think I want to be looking at stats.
My friend Aaron and I were talking about questions of scale the other day and he asked "How big do you need to be?" and I wrote it down and underlined it a lot because it always feels like the most important question. Even if nobody calls the number (and, to be clear, that hasn't happened yet! There's always at least ten messages over the two-week window) I still engage in the practice of posing a question, drafting a message, and writing a newsletter. I am, in short, forging a covenant between myself and the work I believe in. Trust-building happens with ourselves in this practice just as much, or even more-so, than it happens with an audience.
Honestly I love the notion that a person would just put the number in their phone and call it periodically to see what's new, without regard for how long it's been since the last prompt, but that's because I'm hung up on a big Thought Cloud right now about prompted, reactive responses and spontaneous, asynchronous responses and how they build different kinds of community and trust in the internet art-making realm.
ANYWAY. I guess what I'm saying is I'm thinking a lot of thoughts and many of them are coming out as written words but some of them are also coming out as answering machine messages and still, through it all, I'm glad you're here because you make it possible.
<3
L