Day 23: 10 Years Later

My first blog post was on May 23, 2009.

A few things that have changed since then:
*I had a dog. Then I had a long and fairly painful period without a dog. Now I have another.
*I went from my early 40s to my early 50s.
*I started writing the blog as a way to keep my writer brain in shape during the stretches of time when I wasn't working on any kind of a project. The idea of ever publishing anything was little more than a pipe dream. Now I have an agent and a manuscript on submission. I'm almost always either actively writing something or planning what to write next. I suspect this shift is probably the biggest reason why my regular posting has declined so much in recent years.
*The number of people who read any typical post started in the single digits, then gradually climbed into the dozens and hundreds, then gradually declined to far more modest numbers again. Undoubtedly a result of my sporadic posting. I'm still thinking hard about what, if anything, I really want to do about this. Any final decisions on this could well involve conversations and advice with that agent. I know there's at least one more post that demands to be written later this summer, but after that....?

Much of what has been written here over the decade has, in one way or another, reflected who I was or what was important to me at the time, whether it was translated through something intentionally stupid or goofy I wrote, or something that reflected a crisis I had been trying to reconcile. In that way it's been very much like a journal I started keeping in my senior year of high school and continued to write in, over five volumes, well into my teaching career. The big difference, of course, is knowing that whatever I wrote here always had a potential audience. A private journal is much more vulnerable and honest, which is why it's probably for the best that it no longer exists.

It was important to me to have daily posts this month, since doing so would push the blog to the landmark number of 30,000 visits and ten years of writing. I don't know if I'm going to add any more new content this month, though. This time around hasn't had the same internal motivation challenging me to come up with something new. I'm hoping this is a good thing and means I might actually be reaching a point as a writer where I don't feel like I have to prove myself to anyone, which would be a nice evolutionary measure. I acknowledge it could just mean I'm lazy. Or just tired. Because it's May and I'm a teacher and literally only other teachers are ever going to be able to understand what a potent combination that is for pure, uncut exhaustion.

My big goal this month was to try and find a way to name every post after a song title, which I've pulled off up until now, but I don't think I will anymore. I will keep posting this month (at least providing Facebook links), but instead of publishing new content I'm going to take a small celebratory lap for reaching this ten year mark. In the place of new posts I'm going to dig into the blog archives for some of my favorites that either had big reactions when they first came out or didn't get the attention I'd hoped for at the time. There are a few in there I really like, and I think people who spend time reading here might enjoy seeing them if they didn't the first time around.

Maybe I'll still add some new content this month, if I'm inspired. But if not, look for those older posts in the next few days if you're reading this now. And thanks for sticking with me for this long.