My Anniversary

Warning! This is totally self-centered and can be safely skipped.

My anniversary slipped past me some time during November, the date when I had been blogging for one year exactly. I started the blog with very vague ideas about forcing myself to write something every day as a form of practice. A blog looked like a good compromise between trying to publish my ramblings and hoarding them in cardboard boxes in the basement. Then the blog took a life of its own and now it writes me more than the other way round. I'm not a goddess, of course, but the voice of Echidne is what comes out of my mouth when I blog. She's not really like me at all. I'm a lot glummer for one thing and also more modest. Some days I want to kick her out of the door for good, to be honest.

Blogging is very democratic and a wonderful way to get all kinds of voices out there. But it's also quite chaotic and the lack of rules which makes things exciting also makes them messy. Almost every day I wonder what direction I should take, if any, and when I go out and read other blogs I want to come and erase my own because it seems so silly. There's something quite frightening in letting others see your first drafts, and that's all that my blog is: first drafts.

The blog is no longer my writing practice, or only in a very minor sense. It's interesting because of the comments which are mostly much better than anything I say and which teach me a lot. But it also has a kind of personality which isn't mine or something I intended, and now I sometimes find that the blog doesn't want to talk about something that I find curious and talkworthy. I have no idea what this means or if it's just some sort of a mental aberration on my part.

I promised myself a year ago to decide after one year whether to quit the blog or to continue it, and I'm now going through the process of thinking about that. I love blogging and the community I have met on the many and various internets. But anything that doesn't change dies, so clearly something should be changing here, too. One thing I'd want to do is to spend more time on some bigger pieces so that I have more research and thinking under my belt before I post something. That aim conflicts with the desire to have interesting topics out quickly. And then I'd also want to add sound effects and more pictures and animation! And cartoons! This is crazy.

Anyway, happy anniversary to me. And thank you all for reading here.