This thing, this bloggy thing, began as a monthly e-letter back in February 2004. This project began 21 years ago and with this post, I am beginning Volume 22.
From 2004-2008, I sent a monthly letter via email. All sixty of those were the first thing I posted when I moved everything to this blog. In 2009, I posted 12 more, still treating it as a monthly, letter. September of 2009 was the first time I wrote and posted more than one post in a month. Thereafter, I drifted from one longish monthly letter to shorter and more frequent blog posts. This post will be my 887th.
887 posts. I am amazed and proud of the way I have stuck to this project. I am usually not that good at long term projects of this nature. In that first letter, I even noted, “let’s see if I can do this more than one month in a row!” I did have my doubts then.
I used to handwrite everything before putting finger to keyboard. Nowadays, I create an MS Word file, TSoF 20XX for This Side of Fifty and the year and basically do all my blog and article writing in that file. I average 20-30,000 words a year.
The past two years, I have tried to write more for The Armenian Weekly. Their policy is they will only publish articles that haven’t been posted in other media first. So, the articles I write for that paper are published there first and then in my blog. I was already in the habit of writing such bloggy bits on Armenian issues but only for my blog, the only change was first offering the better ones to The Weekly first.
The ongoing, lingering, question is what to do with all of this writing. The interest in answering that question spikes up more when I write these anniversary blogs. Do I try to monetize it? i.e. Do I make an effort to widen the audience becoming a columnist for some newspaper or magazine? I mean, I have always like the New Yorker and the Atlantic. But dang, if that doesn’t just sound like looking for a job? I suppose I am just too far ‘this side of fifty’ to get excited about doing all the detailed work. I suppose, I am just waiting around to be discovered. I could self-publish a “Best of” collection that I could give to family and friends. This seems more my speed. Any of these ideas are good, but sadly, my preferred way of accomplishing any of them is to [1] win a substantial lottery jackpot and [2] hiring others to do all of the detailed business kind of work. Besides an agent and publicist, I would hire a world class proofreader as well. I guess I am saying that enjoy writing but not the business of writing.
Usually in these anniversary posts, I extoll the non-monetary benefits of this 21-year-old project. First and foremost, I write much better and faster than I did before this project started. Is it really good writing? World class? I don’t know. I doubt it. It is not for me to judge. And… it really doesn’t matter. When you are doing something you like, you do it because you like it and are committed to it. I guess that is where I am at and that ain’t half bad.
