Fifteen Years!

 

Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of my blog! I never expected when I started this blog way back in 2008 that it would still be going strong 15 years later. But here we are.

I've had some ups and downs in publishing frequency, and have sometimes not posted for several months at a time, but have never missed an entire year - although 2015 looks a little bleak, with only 4 posts, all published in December of that year. Since I was in the midst of an MFA program at the time, it's probably understandable that I didn't have a lot of time to blog that year. And although I've been determined to do better in 2023, I've sometimes only been able to write and publish once a month. As usual, I vow to do better next year!

I remember the night when I decided to try my hand at blogging. I was working on an early draft of a book, Spiritual Insights from the New Science, which was eventually published many years later. I wanted to try out a few ideas for this book with short blog posts, but didn't know how to get those posts in front of interested readers.

And then I learned about Twitter. This was in 2008, so a very different social media era than we are in now--and to be honest, I didn't really understand why someone would want to use something like Twitter. However, when I learned that it was possible to post links as part of a tweet, I saw at least one use for it. I could write a longer post about a topic I was interested in, post a link to it on a tweet, and try to connect with people who might have an interest in that topic.

It actually worked - until Twitter started to change and became something called X and is now a place I never want to use again. In those early days, I found thousands of people who were interested in the things I was interested in, and Twitter (and, eventually, FaceBook as well) became the portals through which I could bring people to my blog and, in turn, to information about other things I might be publishing (like stories and books). 

The social media landscape is in a state of flux, though, and I've found ways to get the word out about my blog posts and to connect with readers. We will see if I'm still writing blog posts in another 15 years. I hope so!