1500 Blog Posts Milestone!

Maybe most people here probably won’t care about this but for me this is an accomplishment. Writing (not just blogging) is more than a hobby of mine where I enjoy telling stories and talking about things that interest me. Although my career has been web development, my real lifelong goal was to publish and become a writer. I’ve read things like Stephen King saying that you can only call yourself a writer if you pay your bills with your writing. Well, my novel sold enough where I could buy a meal at Del Taco. Does that count? Regardless, I want to just talk about writing in general today and what 1500 posts really mean for me.

I honestly never thought I could make a lot of money in writing though. I’d been discouraged a while back about the idea of self publishing when I worked over at Demand Media and was told by someone how “no self respecting writer would do self publishing.” If I had stuck to my guns and went with some of the other self publishing models, I think I would have been able to do better just because of how early that medium was. Then blogging became a way some people were able to earn a living. Some of the bigger blogs were seen as news and were bought out by other major platforms. While I never believed I could compete at the scale of those writers, I did feel I had the ability to contribute somehow to the writing world in a fashion.

Before I started using this blog, I built my own on a different server and ran that for a long time. Eventually, the mysql database got corrupted with the session table blowing up and I had no easy way of fixing it. That old site was horrible in the UI, etc. but I was proud of the content itself and sad when I lost everything. When I discovered WordPress and how I would be able to manage it myself, it became a natural solution where I could start from scratch, not have to deal with certain technical issues like an autosave feature I didn’t implement and would lose posts, etc. According to my first blog here, I think I started this site in particular in 2012 so it goes to show just how long I’ve been doing this.

Over the years, I wrote things to satisfy my whim and as a means of catharsis (which I guess is a fancy way of satisfying my whim). But the catharsis portion was therapeutic because around 2012, I had undergone a very stressful period of my life when my mother had her stroke and I was under pressure from my aunt to become my mom’s caregiver. As someone who suffers from depression and violent mood things, dealing with that level of pressure along with a horribly stressful job and no visible way out of that scenario caused me to have a kind of midlife crisis. Writing was one of the few things keeping my sanity whether it was creatively (such as the Geek Dot Love story) or just putting my thoughts down here instead of actually doing something horrible to myself or others.

Also, since I don’t have friends that have the exact same interest as me, I used blogging as my own echo chamber where I wanted to jot down things I was thinking whether it was frustrations with certain games, reacting unfavorably to movies or once in a while finding some tech trick that I could use as a future reference or perhaps someone else with a similar problem might find useful.

All of that accumulated somehow into 14+ years or writing that has formed into 1500 published posts. There have been other posts in various stages of drafts but generally when I write, the intention is to get it out the door even with bad grammar and other errors.

As my employment situation has been very rough lately and how the general market for tech has become this volatile, almost self-loathing entity, I decided perhaps it’s a good time to see what I can do with this site. While I don’t have insane traffic numbers, I do get consistent hits all the time (mostly bots these days apparently but that’s a different story). I know that if I want to do this professionally most people suggest going strictly niche. But I’m not that kind of person. A site like this with my name as the URL is very personal and personalized. I’m a person with a broad set of interest and love sharing my viewpoint. So that’s never going to change.

But I do want to say that I want to give this a try. I’ve been attempting to hit a blog post a day, which admittedly is quite difficult. Every day is a struggle for inspiration as well as energy since my health has taken a toll since COVD. But I will say if I can make a living miraculously and be able to support myself through my writing, I would take that over any amount of RSUs because I have zero desire to commute nor work for another sociopathic, unempathetic, avaricious, immoral, unethical, dimwitted goofball called a CEO ever again if given the choice. Freedom, I think, is what people really seek in this world and I am someone who wants as much in an uncompromising manner as possible.