100th Post

I wasn’t quite sure I would make it this far. Remember how it all started?

Well, it got on track after that.

As much as I have claimed to be, or aspire to be, a writer, for a good portion of my life, I don’t believe that I lived up to that claim fairly well. There was a time when I started a blog, several years back, on Blogger. Don’t bother looking for it; I wrote it under an Internet handle, never ID’d myself, and took it down years before my kids ever got into middle school.

As I’ve discussed, consistent writing and myself until very recently have not been close companions. Such was the case with the infamous first blog. I’d post happily every day for a week or two, then just forget about the whole thing for another two weeks. I’d post about every eccentricity that came into my head and got into the bare bones basics of HTML programming to get everything looking nice. And I didn’t even realize that pretty soon there would be a lot of options for plug and play blogging before too long.

I have to say that I like the ease of operations of the WordPress platform for what I do a little more than what Blogger had for me. I like the ease of me being able to cross-post to other social media platforms and its ease of use. I also like being able to track and follow other blogs as well, but I forget if Blogger had anything similar except for RSS readers.(NOTE: If anyone has a suggestion as to whether I should change up the design of the site, let me know. I might keep it this way for a little longer.

I think this blog has become a symbol of the type of focus that I wanted to bring to my writing at the start of this process. I stayed modestly ambitious yet strongly focused on what I wanted this blog to be. I might occasionally spout off on my personal social media about things that bother me on a political level, but I’ve decided to keep this page largely free from politics, although there are a lot of political elements and themes to my books. I’ve kept this dedicated to the writing craft and my journey as a writer, and it has been liberating to try and filter my online presence so that I’m not so much in the muck of the political and cultural combat. That’s even though the main characters of my recent books would certainly have something to say about the issues of the day.

I’ve also stayed consistent with my writing. Even though those weekly writing journals seem to make up a large portion of the past 99 blog entries, they’ve been important in many ways. They have been personal celebrations of how well I was doing on my writing as well as personal postmortems on how things could have gotten better. I said from the beginning that this was as much of a way to track my own progress and output as a writer as it was a way to reach out to other writers, share my thoughts and, eventually, promote my own fiction. Even though sometimes it has only been a weekly blog about what I wrote that week, it was more consistent that any writing I’ve ever done up to this date.

I’m proud of that, and I’m also proud of making it to 100 blogs. I’ll be looking forward to my one-year anniversary on this blog and the next 100 blogs, for starters.