Season’s greetings, dear readers of The All Worlds Traveller.
We’ve been out of town for the Thanksgiving holiday for the past four days. Four days traveling, seeing family, and being present in the moment means an inverse four days spent creating or editing work.
A Workmanlike Endeavor
For the past four years, I’ve posted The All Worlds Traveller every week, typically on schedule Monday morning. If I’m not planning the week’s Traveller in advance, I’m scrambling over the weekend to put together an odd few hundred words, an assortment of edited photos, satisfying SEO to some degree, as well as properly organizing the post, putting in the right keywords and headings, looking up the full names of people in the pictures and any titles they have that are relevant to the post. I’m often sending The Traveller post out to the people pictured and getting their ok, as well as any information I’ve missed or assumptions I’ve made and flagged for correction.
I occasionally scrap a post for its opinions. I joke that The Traveller is a blog without opinions. No opinions, no ads, no promotions. While The Traveller comes from my point of view, I try not to pass judgment and to adhere to a positive viewpoint. I’ve scrapped posts or sections of posts where I complain. No whining here.
So without complaint, allow me to simply state: The Traveller can be a lot of work.
Afterlooking
The Traveller began the first week of January 2021, in the pandemic era. I built it to be my island on the internet, an extension of distantera.com, yet somewhat apart from it. I had a lot to show and share then, and I loved sharing fantastical images with others. Many people seemed to desire fantasy back then, when everyone was still isolated and living under quarantine.
Eventually the pandemic faded, and friends started referring friends to Distant Era. I’d post to The Traveller, friends shared the posts, and they’d find their way to people who had a need or a dream. So I kept to my schedule and my deadlines, and I kept getting work.
At the end of March 2024, something peculiar happened. The two thousand views on Megan Wells’s first portraits declined to one hundred on the later ones. I don’t know how accurate the “views” numbers are on these posts. But work declined as proportionally. Even my family stopped seeing The Traveller in their feeds. At the same time, my own social media became an endless column of targeted ads. I heard the same complaints from friends: ads, ads, and more ads, with posts from friends buried and lost beneath an ocean of ads.
But still I marched on. Partly in hope that this was a phase, but mostly because of the people who told me they enjoyed The Traveller, or that they read it weekly—always a pleasant surprise. I made an unobtrusive subscription form and continued posting weekly, every Monday, on schedule. And yet, we’ve declined from thousands of views at the beginning of the year to a dozen or so.
If the goal of posting consistently and on schedule was to grow interest in the work, that seems to have succeeded before it eventually failed. It’s not, and has never been, about views. It’s more about spending too much time alone in an empty room, both metaphorically as concerns The Traveller‘s flagging reception, and very literally in regard to the amount of time I spend alone in an empty room putting it together.
And So
While Einstein himself may never have said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” the misattributed quote remains poignant.
I don’t plan to stop The All Worlds Traveller. I especially enjoy sharing the fantastical, historical, and science-fiction work that Distant Era makes. I’d enjoy posting more about personal creative endeavors as well.
But I think I need to take a break from the schedule. Some weeks, I just don’t have much to say—especially during holidays or travel.
For the rest of December, until we complete our fourth year of weekly posts, The All Worlds Traveller will continue on a weekly basis, releasing on Monday mornings through December 30.
In 2025, The Traveller will happen when it happens. It may even get some opinions (probably not). It will probably become more interesting with more focused posts. Rather than post on schedule, I’m more likely to post when I have something I really want to share. For years, I’ve considered making audio segments for The Traveller, but I couldn’t figure out how I’d do that with everything else that needs to happen. Maybe now it can.
Distant Era very much needs to change, in many ways.
I need to change as well.
A Steady Gaze
I know nobody needs The All Worlds Traveller. It’s a blog without opinions. It doesn’t teach skills, nor does it attempt to embrace an audience or create a community, even if at times an audience or community finds value in one post or another and inspires me to keep it going.
Each post of The Traveller essentially states, “Here is a thing. Observe if you will.”
I’m not sharing this post to social media, so if you’re reading it, you’re likely one of the aforementioned special, select, cherished community of friends who’ve encouraged this (mostly) photo blog to continue over the years.
Many years ago, while performing at the Ohio Renaissance Festival, I described my week to a friend, which entailed taking summer classes at Ohio University, driving two and a half hours to rehearsal for ORF, and driving two and a half hours back to OU to perform in plays in the evening. It may have been one of The Traveller‘s most supportive readers, Crista Adams, who said to me then, “Are you taking care of yourself?”
The question hadn’t occurred to me until she asked it, but I’ve never forgotten the question, and I try to remember to ask myself that question when I just may be doing too much at once, insisting that I can handle it all.
Changes Come
For Thanksgiving, we returned to the Dayton area, where our family lived from 1987 to 2016. For the last eight years, I’ve driven through, driven past. This has felt very strange, passing the exits for my old stomping grounds without a haven.
But my sister’s family moved back to the area in August, and I’ve had the opportunity to visit twice in November. With family back in the area, it’s become a hub for gatherings once more, the return to holiday traditions that had felt scattered over the last eight years.
After the eight-year absence, from our home base at my sister’s house, I had the opportunity to explore the area where I grew up from middle school through high school. The pool construction place I worked the summer I graduated from high school looks exactly the same as it did. Many of the same shops stand in downtown Yellow Springs, from Dark Star Books to Haha Pizza. A Noble Roman’s pizza place still stands, just as it did when we moved to Ohio from Iowa in January 1987, when “You Give Love a Bad Name” and “Livin’ on a Prayer” were playing on the radio.
Other places have changed significantly. Young’s Jersey Dairy (my high school hangout) continues to grow and grow in to a kind of dairy Disneyland out on Route 68. I visited the site of Greenon High School, which has since been bulldozed and reconstructed, along with Indian Valley Middle School. The Upper Valley Mall in Springfield, Ohio, epicenter of our teenage lives, is gone, though I didn’t stop to see its grave on this trip. I can’t share what these places were like any more than I can visit the Ed Debevic’s Real American Diner I worked at when I moved to Chicago, or the ImprovOlympic as it was in the artsy, off-beat Lakeview of the 1990s. They’re all gone now, reconstructed in other places.
Which has me thinking of the transitory nature of things. What changes and what remains. The transitory nature of relationships, too; I’m always surprised to learn which bonds are ephemeral and which are forged of stronger stuff.
To this end, I rang up my BFF from middle school when I stood before the space that had been Greenon, and we took it in over Facetime. At the end of it, he remarked, “There is arguably no other meaning in life apart from the relationships we have and the experiences we curate.
I believe that. I’ve always believed that. But I’ve lost sight of it a little in the hustle and confusion of the last few years. As things shift and change, I’m resolved to hang on to these things.
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