The blog turns 20 today. It started on Blogger and Blogspot in the days before blog posts over there had titles; in January 2010, I switched over to WordPress and my own domain (I think the first post is this one), and I have since imported all the Blogspot content here and cleaned it up to replace all the internal links to point to this blog and to replace my old Amazon affiliate links with my new Amazon affiliate links (which are now also old Amazon affiliate links, as Amazon kicked me out of the program again, this time because you cheap bastards gentle readers weren’t buying anything through them).
I started it after having read other blogs for a couple of years. I had just finished my novel John Donnelly’s Gold, and I thought a blog would be a good place for me to post essays–something to keep me writing daily, or at least semi-regularly.
But it didn’t work out that way; instead, I found myself posting short, snarky bits on news items. You know, like a blog. More of a linker than a thinker (which was not the original intent, note), but I guess I found I did not have the time to write a well-reasoned essay every day.
Ah, in those early years, I was quite up there in blogs. I was in the top, what, 5000 blogs on the planet (according to the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem). Of course, there were fewer blogs then, and they tended to be individual blogs. And then the consolidations came.
I didn’t really make a whole lot of blog friends, or blog contacts that led me into the wider blog industry. I mean, some people have made a go of it for fifteen years, whether supplementing income or deriving side income from blogging, but I never got called up to the bigs. I did some work for 24th State for a while, but that has been, what, a decade? And I never hit the big time.
These days, I’m mostly writing book reports and thoughts on movies I’ve seen interspersed with stories from my life, little humor bits, and the occasional snarky bit of commentary on the news. I’m not overly political these days because frankly, that’s wearying and boring. I can’t work up the same zeal for it as I did twenty years ago.
But I write it mostly for myself, gentle reader, for myself in a couple of years when I’m wandering back in the archives for some reason–looking to see what I thought about a particular book (and surprised how much time has elapsed since I read it) and then wandering a couple posts forward or back.
I hope you continue to find some amusement in some of the posts. Or, at very least, pleasing photos of actresses on select movie reports.
