Most things (books, TV series, games) that are very successful offer some kind of consolation and comfort. It may be, in many cases, the comfort is the distraction offered from the mess of the consumer’s life, or life in general, and the consolation is merely the holiday of the time away. Horror movies, for example, are a major comfort in that the horror is localized and externalized. As a genre, they can use dread, early on, but they’re not called dread movies. Watching the news brings horror; two hours afterwards, or in our sleep, we are back to dread. (I am – dream last night about mass starvation and fluorescent purple mutant badgers.)
It’s possible Diary will come to offer consolation, to some, simply because it’s microfocussed on something that isn’t them. But I think it may be too unstable, unpredictable, to be a success. Diary isn’t the same thing every day, although it comes in the same form – same hardboard banner across the top (explained yesterday), same initials identifying the tweets.
I could regularize it a little, psychically, by making it arrive at exactly the same time every day – except writing workshop days. But that would undermine the liveliness. The value of simply turning up, being reliable, will have to become apparent over months, years. Even if the number of subscribers only holds steady for a while, I’m losing the unimpressed and picking up the at-least-slightly-more committed. Though I’m not seeing it at the moment, there’s an accumulation of good readers. This might manifest as a slowly increasing number of hearts.
Clearly, the number of people who are going to hear of it through the channels already available to me has reached a ceiling. It will be by going to new places that a difference might be made. (No more self-publicizing, yay.)
Maybe if I stopped asking people to share, and instead begged them to keep it entirely secret? That might prompt them to say, Psst, you should check this shit out? It’s not for the squares, but you might dig it.