While I’d love to claim that this is a complete coincidence, I’ll admit that I did thumb the scales a teensy bit to line up the first post of 2023 with my 900th over all blog post. A teensy bit. My time off was legitimate and I definitely didn’t have anything ready for last Saturday as far as Infrared Isolation goes, but I did decide to still do a post on the 31st and not take an entire week off when I realized I wasn’t going to have Chapter 13 ready just so I could line this up. It was a small amount of effort and is, ultimately, a fairly small thing. I’ve been running this blog since 2017, after all, and while most of those years show huge periods of inactivity from me, 2018 and 2022 saw almost daily posts, and that’s most of 900 posts right there. The rest mostly come from posting in the last third of 2021 and the last two months of 2017, when I got on the daily blogging train for the fist time.

Still, 900 of anything is a lot to have hanging out anywhere. Sure, 900 pennies is not a lot of money, but that’s two an a half kilograms of useless currency. Which, honestly, is a lot of what having 900 blog posts feels like. It’s not much in the grand scale of the internet and represents very little tangible value, but it sure is a lot of one particular thing. And, you know, my time. Given the average amount of time I spend on blog posts is probably an hour and a half, thanks to the dramatically higher amount of time short stories and longer story chapters take to produce, that’s just over fifty-six days of non-stop writing. Two entire Februarys worth of constant effort. Almost a million words of writing. Maybe an actual million words of writing since I don’t really know what my average post length is, anymore. Definitely an actual million words of writing if I count everything I’ve deleted during editing or discarded when a post wasn’t working out for me.

I plan to continue this effort. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop, seeing as I do this mostly to keep my writing skills sharp, to think through things, and to provide an outlet for myself. If I ever become a full-time writer who supports themselves with their writing, I might stop since I probably won’t need the practice. And, you know, I’ll have someplace else to put my writing than a free site on the internet that very few people check out. Which is mostly fine. It feels nice to know that my writing is fairly inconsequential, given how much consequential stuff seems to mostly just go bad these days. Better to toil anonymously than to really stick my foot in my mouth in a way that might make me a main character of any social media site. Modern social media might operate on the idea that all attention is good attention, thanks to the way that social media has basically just become advertising, but I prefer to live my life differently.

I would like to do a victory lap since this post marks the longest I’ve ever stuck to a schedule (as will, technically speaking, every post after this one and many of the ones proceeding it), so I’m going to focus my personal attention on that factoid. I honestly still feel like it takes more discipline to stick to a schedule that isn’t as absolute as my old “post every single day” schedule. I actually have to work at taking days off, at resting, whereas a daily thing means I can just not think about it at all. There’s no question of “should I do work today?” when you’re on a daily schedule. The answer is always “Yes.” On a less regular schedule, the answer can sometimes be “no” and now I have to actually put effort into deciding when I should actually NOT do work. Throw in the buffer I maintain and suddenly it gets very easy to take multiple days of rest as my buffer slowly disappears since I can just make up for days off by doing two posts in a single day (like today, since I wrote Saturday’s post and today’s post on the same day).

I just like being able to see the results of my efforts paying off. Like when I go to rub my shoulders nowadays and feel how muscular they’ve become thanks to my workouts. I’ve always had big shoulders and built muscle easily, but I’ve never had muscular shoulders in this way before and I’m kind of enjoying it. I’ve had muscular shoulders in other ways before and they have never felt as obvious and defined as they do now. It’s great. Just like hitting 900 blog posts thanks to sticking to a six-days-a-week posting schedule for 16 months straight.