On Annuality

So one year ago today I started this humble blog.  I was motivated to do so out of a sense of obligation; since the written genius of my Facebook posts was reaching far too small of an audience, leaving the teeming multitudes of humanity deprived of my scintillating wit.

Humble, like I said.

But in addition, I thought it would be a good exercise in 'writing discipline.'  I have plenty of story ideas, but all too rarely make the time to write them down.  So I made myself a challenge: I would publicly declare my intentions to update the blog as close to daily as possible, without resorting to simply reposting stuff I had already written on Facebook or elsewhere.  If I could do that for a month straight, I figured it would help me develop good habits for writing a little bit every day.

And it actually worked, in the beginning.  For over two months, I made a post every single day.  Honest, you can check it out; a post every single day, all the way into March.  They weren't all winners, but that is to be expected, and none of them were phoned in.  I kept up that pace until I broke my toe which made me stumble (heh,) and miss a day.  Even after that, I was blogging several times a week.  I think that's pretty good.

But what also made me proud of myself was how many of the posts were short stories.  It felt good to use fiction to express my ideas, and this seems like good exercise indeed.  True to my goals, in the early days of the project I also wrote several short stories for submission, and laid the groundworks for a few longer works I hope to develop fully in the future.

A few months after I started this blog, I even started a second one, devoted to my hobby of modifying and painting minis.  I was doing well, posting my thoughts in two separate blogs and feeling more confident about my writing than ever before.

And all that love lasted right about till August.  That's when school started again this year, and I went back to work.  Now, the previous year I had no trouble keeping up with the entries during school, but this year my schedule changed, and I found myself teaching two brand new courses.  Everything had changed from the last time I taught core classes (I'd been teaching Drama and World Literature for like ten years, and baby, I had that shit down tight.)  I'm one of those control freaks who needs to make his own stuff, rather than just use lessons someone else has designed.  But I had finally amassed nearly all the lessons I needed, other than a little tweaking and experimentation every year (you know how it is.)

But this new schedule?  It had me ragged.  Add to that a little girl starting kindergarten, meaning two kids going to separate locations each morning and afternoon, and ti-i-i-i-ime was no longer on my side. All of a sudden I was scrambling for lesson plans every morning and making panicked photocopies just before the bell.  What's worse, because that aforementioned kindergartener has to be picked up from aftercare before 4 p.m., I can generally never stay after school later than 3:30.  This means every minute at school is precious, and that seriously limits my writing time.

And brother you can see the effect by looking at my list of posts.  Right as the new school year begins, there is a precipitous drop in the frequency.  I was lucky to get out a post every two weeks, and frequently less than that.  I'm no less proud of the actual posts I produced, but I do wish there had been more.  In addition, there were numerous posts begun, but never finished simply because I couldn't make the ideas 'gel.'  So my post list shows them as sad little drafts, waiting for their day in the sun.

I fell off the wagon a bit, even over the holiday break, when there was more time for writing.  But now I am dedicating myself to writing more.  I'm going to make more time for writing, both for my blogs and other stories.

And that's where you come in.  Those of you who have read this blog over the course of the past year have provided me with that most invaluable of assets available to a writer; an audience.

Without an audience, there is almost no impetus to write.  Artists are egotists by nature, and this is how it should be.  Only someone who feels what he has to say is worth the time of others to read (and therefore an improvement on their own internal thoughts,) has any reason to write.  And there has never been a greater gift to the self absorbed than the internet.  We live in the Golden Age of Narcissism, and while my awe-inspiring humility makes me immune to the vapid lure of Twitter, Instagram and endless badly-composed selfies (hold the fucking phone upright, ladies!) I am nonetheless susceptible to the siren call of the hit counter on the blog.

Knowing that someone out there has read, and even more importantly, felt the need to share what I have written is beyond gratifying, it's what keeps me writing, and prevents me from just collapsing inward, all my words and ideas forming a singularity, from which not even hope can escape, and the event horizon of which is formed by an accretion disk of black depression and nihilistic thoughts of self-abandonment.

So, thanks for reading, I guess is what I'm trying to say.