Category: Uncategorized

Today is my 59th birthday, and I really did a blog post every
day since my 58th birthday a year ago. You can read them all at the fifty
ninth year tag.

I count 3 days that I really cheated. 2 of them I was sick in
bed. I posted “I’m sick in bed so I’m not going to post today,”
posts not so much because I couldn’t have stayed out of bed long
enough to do a post, but because even the low-grade fever I was
running seemed to be affecting my concentration enough to make
it hard to frame sentences and paragraphs.

The other was a newbie mistake. I started a post that took
longer than I had, and instead of figuring out how to split it
into two, I just posted that you’d get it later or tomorrow, and
it was tomorrow.

There have been a couple that were embarassing, and a lot more
that were “What can I write about that will be easy?” and were
mostly other people’s work. You’ll get fewer of those now that
I’m not going to make myself post every day whether I want to or
not.

But I do find that I like blogging, and will probably want to
continue. I don’t think I’ve turned into a great reviewer, but
I feel less lonely now that when I read a book or see a movie I
like I can post about it and several dozen (at least) people
read it. And I find my posts about recipes I’ve enjoyed cooking
are useful to me when I’m thinking about doing a similar thing
again. The same is true of some of my posts about how I cope
with the technology of my new toys.

Some of what I wanted to accomplish was to improve my writing
skills. I don’t think what I write when I take a lot of time to
polish and rewrite it is a lot better than it was a year or even
10 years ago, but I have learned a lot about how to prune an
idea so that I can do a comprehensible piece of writing about it in half
an hour.

I heard a writer interviewed on the radio who had
gotten started because his AA sponsor wanted him to write about
his life for an hour a day. After a few months of doing that,
he realized that if he could write a couple of pages a day, he
could have a novel in 6 months. I don’t think this is true for
me — even if I’ve written a book’s worth of pages about, say,
Bonnie’s death and what I did and how I felt, it’s still quite a
lot of work between that and a real book.

Although I have some good posts on the spindle, I will probably
take a couple of days off before posting again, so have a good
weekend. I won’t be forcing myself to post when I have lots of
other things that have to get done that day, so posts on Tuesday
and even Wednesday may get fairly rare, because that’s when I do
the work of running the band and publishing the music for it.
But this is definitely au revoir, not adieu.