Weekend Coffee Share: In Which I Transfer My Flag (Again)

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you it’s odd to be publishing a #WeekendCoffeeShare post here after working so hard to keep the personal-ish stuff off my pop culture blog for most of a year. I think I’ve only posted one truly personal post here since January, and I am not sure how these are going to play.

I’d tell you the Sci-Fi/Star Wars Saturdays aren’t going away — that’s a feature I’m interested in doing consistently, but we aren’t quite there yet. Most weeks, my coffee posts will run on Sundays here, but given that I’m making such big changes with my blogging, I thought it wise to publish this one today and get it into the linkup early.

And I’d tell you it’s good to be back to Sourcerer. You may have noticed that I’ve upped the frequency of my personally-written content here. That’s partly because we have fewer contributors during this part of the year than we do in the spring and early summer. It’s partly because this blog works better when I’m posting and chattering on the threads here, even though most of our contributors draw more readers than I do. You’ll see what i mean by that when I share my stats from the last few months here tomorrow.

I think of Sourcerer as “the little blog that could.” It should not have worked as well as it has. It started out as a blog where I mostly shared music videos and published incomprehensible posts about my plans and my struggle to understand social media. I’ve come within a hair of pulling the plug and moving on several times. But every time I’ve reached that point, people have stepped up and given me the support I needed to continue.

In January of last year, several offline friends, and people I met through offline friends, helped me put together a short run of everyday blogging and that allowed us to reach the point where I, along with Diana, Jeremy, Will, and a few others, were able to get through the spring and summer while Diana and I did the A to Z Challenge at two other blogs.

David came in at some point to blog music — I don’t remember when. But when we reached the point that Jeremy was almost done with Batman and I was desperate for quality comics posts, David stepped up and jumped right into Marvel. Once that Batman run hit the six-month mark, it became clear that this blog can’t survive long without mid-week comics.

Luther came in for The Walking Dead at just the right moment. At the point he did, I was beginning to feel like maintaining this blog along with everything else I was doing was requiring me to ask too much of David and Diana. Luther’s participation — though we never talked about this — convinced me we were far enough along to go out for contributors. So I did.

Now, on any given week, you might see posts from any of the bloggers I’ve mentioned already. You also might see Melissa, Hannah, Rose, or Natacha publishing here. We’ve established easy channels of communication so I don’t have to put planning stuff into public posts and ask everyone to read them just to see who’s interested. Nor contact a dozen people privately when I need to talk about the blog. We’ve developed a way of doing collaborative posts that read like three-minute podcasts and we’ve set up an interview feature that has real potential, based on its popularity so far.

This isn’t the whole crew — it’s just the ones I can easily cram into a 30-minute coffee post off the top of my head. Despite the modesty of our success here, this blog is the most promising thing I’ve ever done on the Internet. It’s more important than my personal blog.

I honestly don’t know why most of these other bloggers are so willing to publish here. It’s a genuine puzzle to me. But the level of support and trust I’ve received from other content producers over the last two years is not something I’ve seen many small-time bloggers start out from nothing and achieve. It’s not something I take lightly, and I’m grateful for it every single day.

So I’m analyzing the stats from the summer and putting most of my own content here until I’m able to return completely to form. I’m finishing my Tolkien series at Part Time Monster as soon as I can manage that. I’m carving out some social media time to spend liking and commenting on blogs every single week from here on out. When October rolls around, I’m looking to add two to four new bloggers to the crew for 2016 and do what we’ve done here all over again next year.

You’ll see these coffee posts here on either Saturdays or Sundays from here on out. Pop culture content always takes priority on Saturday when we have it, so often, this will be a Sunday thing. Sometimes they will be straight-up personal coffee posts; sometimes they’ll read like “From the Instigator-in-Chief” posts; sometimes I’ll roll the Social Media Sundays into them. It depends on how I’m feeling and what I have to talk about on any given week.

Don’t forget to add your coffee share post to the linkup at Part Time Monster, and to share it with #WeekendCoffeeShare on Twitter.

Done.