IWSG: Happy B-Day, IWSG!

 

This month's question:

September 6 question: The IWSG celebrates 12 years today! When did you discover the IWSG, how do you connect, and how has it helped you?

   

     Wow.  12 years!

    I'm not sure exactly when I found out about the IWSG.  I started blogging on Wordpress in late summer of 2014 and blogged daily for a year (as part of a self-challenge, essentially) at which time I was pretty good about actively reading other people's blogs as well, and I know I followed several other, actually published writers at that time, at least one of whom is also in the IWSG, possibly more than one but I'm no longer sure, so presumably I found out about the IWSG through them, and thus likely joined around late 2014/early 2015.

    Eventually, though, my blogging started getting more and more erratic.  By the time Wordpress changed the way their free accounts worked to the point of them basically being unusable, making me leave for Blogger, I was barely posting more than once a month.  And that's kind of remained the status quo, though I think lately I'm starting to post more often (even if it's mostly been random fandom stuff as if this was tumblr), which is something, I suppose?  But to address the actual question, there have been periods where the monthly IWSG post was the only thing keeping my blog active at all, which maybe doesn't even address the question. 😅

    I'm afraid I don't really connect as much as I used to:  back when I first joined IWSG, I was pretty good about visiting a lot of the other members' posts, but at this point I have a tendency to get distracted and forget. 😰  I'm getting old and scatter-brained, I guess. 😭  (I'm also developing a weird inability to express myself without using emojis.  I blame Discord...)

    So...it's hard to say how it's helped.  I feel like it helped me a lot more back when I was on Wordpress and was more active in the community.  Probably if I had things to say that were more...how do I want to put this?  It's like, mostly these days what I post is something that doesn't really have an easy solution (or a solution at all) and so there's not much help I even can get, if that makes sense.

    For a long time, the day of/after the monthly IWSG post has been the only time this blog has seen any visitors, but that's starting to change since I posted my blog's URL on my AO3 profile, though I'm not sure if that's actual people visiting or some kind of bot thing, since none of them click on the "My Fiction" page link in the sidebar, which is sorta where I'd expect visitors from AO3 to go.  🤷