Never Index Your Own Blog
A 200th post checkpoint 🗂️
In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, the (fictional) professional book indexer Claire Minton warns the narrator: “Never index your own book.” Indexing, she says, is “a thing that only the most amateurish author undert[akes] to do for his own book.” It is “self-indulgent” (italics by Vonnegut), “a revealing thing,” “a shameless exhibition.” She goes on to derive all sorts of things about the (fictional) author of the biography that the narrator is reading, such as that he’s in love with the woman the biography is about, has mixed feelings about his father, is insecure, and — as Claire Minton’s husband whispers to the narrator a bit later, for this is the 1960s — that he is a homosexual. “She can tell that from an index, too.”
Well. I guess me writing an index for my own blog might be self-indulgent and revealing. Maybe you can tell from it that I am a homosexual. But I’m doing it anyway, because, after all, writing a blog is inherently a form of shameless exhibition. Might as well own it up.
The reality of writing a blog weekly for nearly four years, with no restrictions on theme and topic, is that you end up covering a lot of themes and topics. Far more, certainly, that you can keep track of at any given point. I constantly forget and re-discover what I’ve written about in the past, which is fun, but also comes with downsides, such as the risk of repeating myself. There are also routine occurrences of telling myself, “I’m pretty sure I’ve written about e.g. golden ages / Napoleon / optimization / Toronto / etc. before but I’m too lazy to find so whatever.” So my index serves the regular intended purpose of any index, which is to be the map to a written work.
But there’s more to it. The primary purpose of cartographic maps is to guide people around a territory that is far larger than the map. Their secondary purpose, however, is to allow a low-resolution view of the territory, so that it can fit in people’s brains. When you look at a map of the world, or a country or city, or a non-geographic entity like history or human knowledge, you can comprehend the mapped territory in a different sense than from just experiencing the real thing. That can be both useful and beautiful, even if much of the complexity is hidden away. There is awe in seeing a compressed but all-encompassing image of something grand.
This blog is, among other things, about crystallizing a part of myself: the topics I’m interested in, the ideas I’ve had, the art I’ve enjoyed. It provides a map of myself. A measure, even if incomplete and necessarily smaller than my person, of what I am about.
Yet, as I said, the blog is still too large to fit in my brain. A distillation, in the form of an index, is therefore attractive: it is a map of the map of myself. (I suppose the implication is that I consider myself grand and awe-inspiring. Perhaps Claire Minton was onto something with her accusations of self-indulgence. In my defense, I consider everyone grand and self-inspiring!)
So, anyway, I’ve been slowly compiling this index. I’m doing it in a somewhat old-fashioned way, as if this were a book: I go through each article, one by one, and select the most relevant items to add to a big alphabetical list. Instead of page numbers I use post numbers, and I add occasional emoji to spice it up. It’s still a work in progress, but there are already more than 800 entries — a draft of a cartography of the topics I like thinking and writing about.
It’s been a cool project. For one thing, it’s forcing me to revisit each of my past posts, allowing me to rediscover hidden gems and/or cringe at terrible takes I’ve had. (I expect more cringing to come: I’ve indexed approximately the last 100 posts, so the truly awful ones from my earlier days are still untouched.) For another, it’s interesting to think of what and who deserves to be in the index. A brief mention of a minor historical character might not make it, if I never expect to look them up in the future; and it’s never quite obvious whether an abstract concept like “changing your mind” should be indexed or not. It’s all rather arbitrary; but, you know, I don’t need to fret over what the original author would think of the index.
Such are the advantages of indexing one’s own blog — and to hell with Claire Minton and her bogus fictional advice.
The index page is accessible here and also from the top menu. It’s available only to paid subscribers — a rare nugget of gated content on what has otherwise been an almost fully free website.
Which brings us to the actual main topic of today’s post: the future of Atlas of Wonders and Monsters.
I am pleased to announce that this post is the 200th one! I have never missed a week since I began writing this two hundred weeks ago, in November of 2020. This merits a festive emoji: 🎉.
On the occasion of reaching my original goal of 100 weekly posts, in October 2022, I wrote a little history of the blog up to that point, together with reflections. At the time I had 657 free subscribers and 0 paid ones. Today I have 3,880 free subscribers and an undisclosed low two-digit number of paid ones. It’s been remarkable growth, certainly more than I ever had any reason to expect.
On the other hand, the joy is a bit dampened that the fact that audience growth has essentially flatlined in the past month:
The vagaries of Substack subscriber growth are still a high-order mystery to me. Why did I win 5-10 new subscribers per day back in June and July, but only 1-3 now (while losing an equivalent number)? No clue. I think a lot of the newcomers came from recommendations from other substacks; but that seems to have slowed down for some reason? I suppose I’ve been lucky to have that past growth without really putting in any special effort, so I’m not complaining. Perhaps I do need to put in special effort now.
There also hasn’t been much growth in the paid subscriber department. With some people cancelling and others subscribing, I’m at the same point I was at last February. This is fine, since I don’t really write for money, and I’m offering almost no benefits to paid subscribers (except the index!). The mystery here is why some people send me money at all (thank you from the bottom of my heart!). Still, seeing consistent growth in revenue would be nice. And I know that some other Substack blogs, even smaller ones, have a much more enviable free-to-paid conversion rate than my 0.5% or so.
One possible — and bleak — explanation for the slowing growth is that my blog has been getting worse. I must unfortunately give some credit to this sorry theory: I do feel, subjectively, that I haven’t been able to write many truly good posts recently. Part of the reason is that my work situation has changed, for the better, so I have less time to write.
A darker reason might be that I am finally running out of steam. It’s been close to four years of writing almost weekly (the “almost” coming from the few times I reposted an old essay from somewhere else), and perhaps I need a writing vacation. I remember reading Venkatesh Rao (I can’t find where, I think it was on Substack Notes) on how every creative person should take breaks, sometimes long ones: otherwise you become stale.
But you can guess the problem: I’d lose the bragging rights to a continuous multi-hundred posting streak! Plus, I don’t know if a break would actually help, or actually make things worse by making me spend less time writing — which tends to correlate with my best thinking. Perhaps my creative mind would shrivel rather than regrow. So I haven’t been seriously considering a break yet, even though I’ve had a draft for a post about “becoming stale” for months now. Maybe it is now time, after 200 posts? I don’t know.
Maybe it’s time to explore other changes to my routine, too. All of the following are things I’ve been considering:
Try to grow paid subscribers more, in order to turn this blog into meaningful supplemental income. I could paywall some posts — maybe especially spicier ones about politics or sensitive topics? I’ve resisted writing those for a time but would like to, maybe paywalled posts is the solution.
Going in a totally different direction: I could slow down, post two out of every three weeks, or every other week. Possibly this would give me time to write higher quality posts, which might drive more growth. Or it could achieve none of that and just slow down growth proportionally. Which might fine (see: taking a break).
I could have periodic lower-effort posts:
I’m thinking, for instance, of link posts, where I just list a bunch of links to interesting stuff I’ve read, with a little bit of commentary. Many bloggers do that from time to time. I’ve started compiling one such post, but I haven’t fully made a habit of saving links yet.
Guest posts might be another option, though I wouldn’t know who to invite! Maybe I should be more intentional about my relationship with other bloggers?
Start blogging in French. I tentatively created an empty substack here. This would help with absolutely nothing (I would have to either write more in total or write less here, and the new blog would start from near zero!), but it’s been something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. The ideal super ambitious outcome would be to eventually get some local recognition in the local media landscape in Quebec, which I’m familiar with but have never contributed to. (And then start pushing some ideas this place is desperately in need of, like progress-studies type things.) This would, however, take a long time and a lot of work.
Maybe I need a collaborator for this. If that’s you, please reach out!
Rename the blog. I still mostly like Atlas of Wonders and Monsters but it’s awfully long. And the prosody is bad; I hate saying it out loud. Possibly there’s some low-hanging marketing fruit here in just having something that’s easy to remember. I don’t think I’d want to change the broader aesthetic, though, and I don’t have any ideal new name ideas. Possibly:
Atlas of Random
Atlas of Monsters
Wonders and Monsters
Atlas Salt A (just because that’s a palindrome lol)
Metaphorical Map
Metaphorical Monsters
some cool Latin phrase having to do with maps or monsters
something totally different because this blog isn’t actually very much about either monsters or maps, except metaphorical ones like indexes
Please suggest ideas for a new name if you have them! And also please feel free to comment on any of the above ideas. This 200th post is a checkpoint: the ideal time to get some reader feedback.
For the time being, and at least until the 4-year mark in November, I’m going to just keep going. Grow the map of myself, and grow the index. There are still so many topics, so many wonders and metaphorical monsters, that I haven’t had the occasion of writing about.
I’m sure you already know this, Étienne, but during the Renaissance a myth arose that there was carved onto the Pillars of Hercules guarding the Strait of Gibraltar the phrase, “Non Plus Ultra”, meaning “nothing further beyond”, perhaps you could tweak this for a blog title: Plus Ultra — “more beyond”. Perhaps covers both your love of cartography and your interest in delving into interesting topics?
Congratulations! And I've always thought of this as Atlas of Wonders...