What Do I Have After Eight Years of Blogging?

I recently discovered that WordPress could show me how many words total I have written on this blog. From January 2012 when I began blogging through 2019, I posted 502,077 words.

That’s five good-sized novels.

Before I published my first novel, I was told at writing conferences to build an online platform. That was one reason I started writing the blog. Many of my posts were intended to describe the historical research I’ve done for my novels and provide insights into the lives of Western pioneers, as well as to promote my books.

Besides promoting my historical fiction, I also wanted to preserve some family stories that were being forgotten as my mother declined due to Alzheimer’s. In the eight years since I started the blog, I have lost both of my parents. Now I am without “any sky above me,” as my friend told me, and so telling our stories is even more important. (Plus, there are few people who can contradict me—I am the keeper of many of the stories.)

But sometimes I wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off devoting my time to working on novels, rather than to blogging. Just think about what I could have done with 500,000 words, if I used them on novels instead of posts! I could already be done with my goal of publishing ten novels before I’m seventy, or at least be very close to completing it.

That is water under the bridge. Or water over the dam, if you prefer that version of the idiom. No use crying over spilled milk, to use a third liquid adage.

The fact is that now these 500,000 words exist. The better issue for me to debate is what use to make of my words beyond the blog.

I once had a teacher who recommended we re-use our essays and other assignments as often as we could. In other words, if I wrote a two-page essay in French, could I use it again in an English class? Or a History assignment? It’s not plagiarism if you’re using your own creations.

I tried that on occasion. Sometimes it worked well. Sometimes it didn’t. One failure I recall was a poem I wrote in German for an assignment in my German class. I later tried to translate it into English to use for an English assignment, but I couldn’t make the rhyme scheme work. I finally rewrote it as a free-verse poem in English. I got a passing grade.

In college, I wrote a short story in French for an assignment—we were to write a story in the style of Guy de Maupassant. My story wasn’t very good, but the point was to write in French, which I did. The next term, I turned it into an English short story for a Creative Writing class. There, the quality of the story was more important. Again, I got a passing grade, but I never liked the story, and I don’t think I’ll ever publish it—I don’t think it’s worth the time to edit it into publishable form.

But some of my 500,000 words on this blog are pretty good. And now these words are burning a hole in my pocket, to use another idiom. Could I publish some posts in a short anthology like Family Recipe (my collection of stories and poems about family life)? Could I publish a modern guide for today’s travelers on the Oregon Trail? I hate to see the words sitting dormant on the Internet, awaiting a casual browser to happen upon them.

Or maybe I should focus my efforts on novel-writing. After all, I only have six more years to publish five books so I can meet my age 70 goal.

Readers, what do you think I should do?