One Year
Let me check my watch here - yep, it's been one year today since I started this journal thing. Which probably means I should write something about it - or at least tell Diane Patterson so she can add it to her list of journals at least a year old.
Actually, I don't get very worked up over my own anniversaries anymore. Sometimes I do, but not to the extent that I put a whole lot of effort into it. I guess the last anniversary I put any effort into was APA Centauri's 100th mailing, about two years ago. I sat down and wrote a fairly personal piece about my experiences being in the APA (for, at that point, nearly nine years), the friendships I'd made, and the fun (and sometimes the not-fun) I'd had. It got some nice reactions from people.
I don't generally celebrate holidays - Christmas is about it - and although my birthday is special to me, I don't throw myself parties or anything. I usually try to go out for a nice dinner, or maybe take the day off, but that's about it.
This may mean that I'm turning into my father, who used to wonder why people got worked up over anniversaries ending in a zero digit, such as "issue #100" of a comic book. "It's just another number", he'd say. In retrospect, what got me excited was that the creators would usually do something special for those issues - wrap up a major storyline or have a "giant-sized" issue, but that begs the question of what made the creators go to such lengths.
(These days, 100 issues is worth celebrating primarily because few comics books reach 100 issues. Most comics seem to get cancelled before they even reach 50. I'm sure that many creators when they start a new series expect to get a year, maybe two, to tell their stories, before cancellation.)
But I digress.
A year ago, when I started this journal, I mainly did so because I was excited about journals like Ceej's Black Book (at the time called her Battered Black Book) and Scotty's World (at the time called "The Days and Nights of... Me! (and my dog)"). Of course, I was also kind of bored at the time, and thought this would be a neat thing to try. I'd tried to keep journals before, but had never been successful. My basic reaction was, "What's the point if only I'm going to read them?"
But I've kept at it. I certainly don't feel obligated to write every day anymore, but I write more than some, I think.
I've written some fairly personal things, and some things I've been nervous about, and overall it's worked out okay. Although I do censor myself a little more these days because of people I know who read my journal. The fact is that writing for strangers is considerably less inhibiting than writing for people you know. There are journals which flatly ask that if you know the journaller in person, then don't read them. I haven't done that (although I have thought about it).
Recently, especially while working on my threads library I realized how useful this thing is as a document to go back and read, as I'd forgotten much of what I did last fall, or, rather, that last fall was when it happened. I've written some stuff of which I'm proud, and some stuff which is basically dross. And I've gotten some nice and some useful feedback from my readers (who number around 15 regular, as far as I can tell), and I've gotten around 3000 hits to my main page (at least, hits from people with "show graphics" turned on in their browsers).
Oh, and the past year's worth of entries weigh in at around one-and-one-half megabytes of disk space.
So, that's it for my first year. But I'm not quitting, and I haven't even entertained thoughts of quitting. I'll keep at this as long as I feel it's worthwhile. And so far, it has been.
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