Tag: Anniversary

Ten-Year Anniversary

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Though it happened a couple of weeks ago and I’m not entirely sure of the date because WordPress’s alert would not tell me (and I can’t remember), some time at the end of March marked the ten-year anniversary of this blog. I consider this milestone to be a pretty big deal despite how unorganized I’m being about this.

Over the years, things were a bit shaky in terms of output. I knew I wanted to review books, but I also wanted to use this as a vehicle to publish thoughts and ideas about all sorts of storytelling media (which I’ve largely left in the past). I remember I started with the idea of posting something every Tuesday, which I recall doing fairly consistently, but I sometimes had to stretch for an idea of what to post when a review wasn’t at the ready to be written. Eventually, blogging became more habitual and I found I could make myself more flexible with when I posted, and I became a lot more confident with my book reviews.

Turns out a weekly schedule of some sort did still come in handy though, as I feel I owe a lot to WWW Wednesday for giving me a weekly meme to take part in that gives me a good excuse to post updates about what I’m reading; of course, I could have just posted updates on my own, but the participatory aspect gave me the nudge that I really needed.

There are many simple things I should have done for this blog in all this time that I just haven’t, most of which I’ve probably not even thought of, but I’m proud that I’ve been able to keep this thing going, regardless of changes in my schedule, for so long. Consistency is the one thing I feel I did right in terms of admin, and I’m routinely pleased with the amount of traffic my existing posts manage to bring in. Time was that I was anxious about how many likes each new post got, but I’m happy it never stopped me from posting. There’s no guaranteed way to make it big, but if you keep at something there’s a good chance of some sort of returns, however modest.

As a note on something I’m particularly proud of, I started reading the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett in 2016, and to date I’ve read 24 novels from that series; each novel has a corresponding review on this blog, and I intend to keep that going.

Furthermore, here’s a small list of five book reviews I’m particularly proud of:

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Tomie by Junji Ito

Into the Unbounded Night by Mitchell James Kaplan

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

I’m sure there’s more if I revisited things in more depth, but these always stick out in my mind. I’m sure I could go on about this milestone, but I wanted to keep this brief while still allowing myself to acknowledge this as something of a big deal for me.

Thank you to everybody who has stuck with me over the years or just stopped by to read a post or two.

Thank you for reading.

Five Year Anniversary

Ryan4 Comments

This is a little awkward because April 4th doesn’t actually hold any significance for this blog, but life got in the way of things a tad so here we are. That being said, the anniversary for this blog/site is a little muddy anyway. I first registered it on March 27th, 2014, but I did not put up my first post until April 1st. I didn’t really feel great about having this tied to April Fool’s Day anyway.

Five years is a significant milestone and it honestly feels a little uncanny that I’ve had this going for that long now. I look back on my first few years posting with a lot of mixed feelings. There are some posts I continue to be quite happy with, but I kept too rigidly to a limited schedule and was far too all over the place in terms of what content I posted or what I wrote about. Not great for grabbing a reading audience’s attention and keeping it, but I’m pleased I cemented a writing habit all the same.

I’ve become a lot more focused since then, both on how often I write and being more consistent on what I write about. I’m pretty regularly happy with the posts that I write, while maintaining that oh-so important mindset that I could always improve. In keeping with the immortal words of Bob Ross (whom I often have playing in the background while I write):

“I hope you’re plagued with dissatisfaction your whole life, that way you’ll always strive to do better.”

Readership has been on the rise the last couple of years since my shift in how I post, and while the numbers are still quite modest I’m endlessly grateful to everyone who has come here to check out my writing. Ultimately, that’s what this is all about. I’m happy I’ve been able to make it this far and I wanted to put out a thank you to anyone and everyone who reads this blog, whether you randomly stumble upon it once, check in every now and again, or read on the regular. I will always be grateful to you.

Here’s to even more years to come.