Today is My 100th Post

It’s hard not to get all meta with this blogging thing. I had another post written, and scheduled, but it was kind of a throwaway. Filling in the days sort of thing. Then I realized. Wow! 100 posts. Maybe I actually DO this thing, then.

As you might suspect from my title, I’m a bit of a starter. I like trying out new things, but I don’t tend to go in expecting much. There are a few things that I come back to again and again, but I’m not averse to doing a single adventure race, learning to rappel and then never doing it again, taking one month of karate, teaching a university course once, or reading up on a subject for several months before dropping it indefinitely. I’m a great nibbler. But I’m reluctant to commit to new pursuits, because I’m not a very good quitter. When I commit, I wind up trapping myself in things, slogging away at four years of a university program, or two years of a professional job before I acknowledge that it is making me (literally) crazy. (Yes, I know the difference between literally and figuratively. I do mean literally, here.) This makes me reluctant to do things like sign up for PostADay. I’m not being ableist in my first post; madness really does lie that way.

So what was I thinking, signing up for the blogging equivalent of the ultramarathon? First, I thought, “No! Terrible Idea. Just another thing to get trapped by!” And then I thought, “Wait. Aren’t you doing this to reinvent yourself? Didn’t you say that you were going to be a writer, gosh-darn-it?” (Only it wasn’t that G-rated in my head.) And then I thought, “You can quit at any time, you know.” And then I thought, “Maybe I’ll just stick this tag on here. You know, in case this turns out to be a good idea after all. I’m only trapped by my own stories.” If I can avoid the madness and step through the fire, that way liberation lies, too.

One of the advantages of having thrown out all the rules of blogging is that I don’t feel confined. I really am a dilettante. I can dip my toes into waters or dive deep. If I’ve said all I have to say on a subject, I never need to come back to it. If I have a picture instead of 1000 words, I can go with that. If I have 1500 words instead of a picture-and-a-half, I can go with that, too. 100,000 words into this project, I’m just getting warmed up. You should see the stack of index cards building next to my keyboard.

It’s not that I’m blogging for a living. I’m telling stories, in hopes that they will help somebody in the world, while I learn to produce the volumes of text necessary to get paid for that. I don’t want ads – and whose going to advertise with a dilettante, anyway? How would they possibly do any keyword targeting when I blithely ignore SEO, change blog subjects every three days, and write thousands of words at a time? Nope. No monetization strategies here. Just storytelling, meaning making, and knitting. And chickens. And parenting. And sociology. And whatever else strikes my fancy. Let’s see. 8 posts down, 354 to go.

There. How meta was that?