The Flames of Blogust

So we failed to hit Blogust's goals.

We weren't even close.

But before Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me" had even finished its piano/keyboard duet intro and before I had pulled out a tumbler glass to get busy drinking myself into oblivion (which is no easy task when one doesn't drink, despite the phenylethylamine in hot chocolate), Blog strolled in.

"Oh for fucks sake," Blog said. "Are you fucking kidding me?"

"What?" I asked, plugging in my electric kettle.

"You're not even thinking of moping are you?" Blog asked. "Because this post-failure pep talk thing is going to wear thin as a cliche to your audience if you keep using it every time you fail at something. Besides we already had the whole poignant failure moment with the Cool Runnings clip and the Inception music and everything. What was the point of that if you're going to get all maudlin about it anyway?"

"I'm just sort of pissed at how much we missed by," I said. "Over ten thousand."

Blog sighed. "It's like talking to a wall sometimes. If I had a head, I'd be shaking it."

I pursed my lips.

"Okay look," Blog said. "Last four or five months around here have been 32, 33 thousand right?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Kind of disappointing, really. Looked like a plateau," Blog said.

"Right."

"Well in one month you came within spitting distance of 40,000, you wrote some awesome articles, you started a couple of major undertakings. You didn't have a single day under 1000. So you didn't hit your goal. We both knew it was ridiculous. The point is that in trying you kicked ass. Writing is not a hail mary hobby. It's always about working the ball down the field.

"More importantly, you also learned a valuable lesson about the line between quantity and quality and how more isn't always better. Churning out articles didn't make you feel like a creative writer, it made you feel like a content writer. So now you've learned something really important about how you always worry about writing more. Fuggedaboutit. Use that insight to write my entries at a more reasonable pace. Don't worry so much about the day off or the jazz hands days and focus on nailing it when the real articles land."

I nodded. "I guess that's true, huh?"

"You bet your left testicle it is. Now stop being melodramatic and drinking hot chocolate with whipped cream. September is already three days old and I need you at your fighting weight before I start smacking you around to get me a million hits by the new year..."