Jeremy C Kester

It’s not quite Spring, being but a few more days away from the official start, but as March comes around, Spring is on the mind as most people don’t think of the seasons from the Solstice and all, we think about it by months, and March, April, and May are the Spring months. Anyway, without dwelling too long in the arguments for or against however “Spring” is defined, with the denoting of the season, comes the idea of cleaning. And that is what has been on my mind for some time.

But this post is a little different, as the reason for the thought of cleaning these last few days has been spurred by something different. The cleaning I am thinking about is with this site. And it has to do with the blogs/poems/short-stories on the site. How long should I be keeping them up? Do I want to keep piling them on until they reach the sky?

I’ve only been working this site in some form or another for about 8 or so years. It has been up and down and all around in that time with fits of daily posting (like now) and long stretches of sporadic, desolate posts. In other words, there isn’t a super long catalog of blog posts that anyone has to really dig through, were that even something that they wanted to do. But it isn’t even blog posts that I am concerned about. If they accumulate with no end in site, so be-it. If I wrote something that years later I believe is patently wrong, then I don’t care if there is evidence to a once-held-ill-belief. We grow; we change.

My concern is with my poems and flash fiction. How long do I keep them up for? Should they be listed forever on my site? Do I want them there forever?

The key to that question is in the second word. I. Me. What is it that I want to do? Because examples abound for pretty much every which way to do it, it is up to me to figure out what I want to do and why I want to do it that way.

To start with, I am not comfortable with the whole “forever” part. Leaving my stories and poems live on my site for an extended time beyond a year feels excessive. It feels like the stories are trapped on there. It’s a bit melodramatic, but that is how it feels to me. That much has little to do with right or wrong as in this case, there is no real right or wrong. That’s where I need to start from: I am not comfortable leaving my work up for a long period of time.

If I decide that there must be an end-date to when a short story or a poem remain on the site, the next question has to be — then how long? How long do I leave them up? A week? A month? A year? 5 years?

My first instinct is that a week is way too short. So it a month. But a year almost feels too long. 6 months sounds somewhat in the right range for me. That will mean that as long as I stick with the regular weekly posting, there will be 26 poems and 26 flash fiction short stories up on the site for free at any given time. That sounds even like a little much, but I am willing to work with that.

Then of course there will be a handful of stories or poems that will remain permanent fixtures on the site. Some because they are samples out of a book and others that I feel are just best left on the site.

Given that, the rest of this week as I get some free time, I’ll be going through and deleting some of these old poems and short stories. Then, going forward, I’ll just keep refreshing each week as new ones come.