Blah-gging for a Decade

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In the wee hours of the first of April, 2001, I decided to try this thing I’d just heard of on TechTV called “blogging.”  The .org had been around for about five months at that point, and at first my blog was separate from the .org, hosted on Blogspot, until I integrated it with the .org later.  That first night I wondered if Blogger would automatically adjust the time for Daylight Savings Time, since I’d literally created the blog in the last minutes before the switch.  (It did.)  Reading through those early entries recently reminded me not just of how Daylight Savings Time used to start much later, but also of how I used to be up at two in the morning on a regular basis back then, something that hardly ever happens today unless I’m driving home from visiting friends.

Back then I used my blog kind of like I use my Twitter today, for shorter updates on more personal items.  It would be several years before I overhauled the blog for mostly long-form political essays (and the .journal basically atrophied), and until then my blogs tended to be very short and, honestly, very immature.  Still, those first three months I blogged I had to deal with a lot of chaos in my life, from Grandpa Shannon’s death to the Week From Hell (two friends literally disappeared, I lost my biggest client at work, and of course the fire at the house), getting my first car (and my first — to date only — traffic ticket later in the night), and going back to school for the first time in over six years.  Maybe some immaturity was to be expected back then.

Still, I come here to write tonight with possibly even more chaos in my life.  I’ve mentioned the novel I’m in the middle of editing, and I’m feeling more and more like I may have something ready to shop around to agents in the near future.  I’m also editing a couple of screenplays down in the hope of something possibly sparking there as well.  My personal life has taken numerous turns in just the past year, and although I have many more avenues available to me on that front than I can ever remember having, I also have more anxiety about those things than ever.  It doesn’t help that so much of my life right now is wound up dealing with huge changes to come in the months ahead.  There will be major, life-altering changes coming very shortly in my life, but right now I’m still not sure what form those changes will take.

My lack of recent blogs is only the most visible sign to most of you of just how chaotic things have been for me.  I’ve stopped watching television almost entirely, only catching one weekly show for the sake of being able to communicate with a friend better, and almost all my “free” time now is taken up with working on my writing career.  Some things I’ve dropped from my life are for the best, like video games.  Other things, like dieting and exercise, I need to shoehorn back into my life in the worst possible way, but that’s hard to do when so much of my life is in tremendous flux.  I don’t deal with uncertainty that well, and I’m dealing with more of that now than I think I ever have at any other point in my life.

I wish I had some clever or profound way to end this entry, but honestly I just want to get this posted and linked and get back to working on the edits to my first novel again.  I have a sanity break planned for tomorrow — that’s why I’m posting this tonight, not tomorrow when the actual anniversary is (plus there’s the whole April Fool’s thing) — but then it’s right back to work, trying to get my writing projects into professional shape and hoping that my plans to change things around in my life yield the fruit I hope they will.  I cannot allow all this hard work to be for naught.

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