Blog Birthday
From "Thin Birthday"
Today is the one year anniversary (ironically, the “paper” anniversary) of this blog.
I have made 473 posts and gotten over 10,000 views. (A small number for a blog, but amazing to me.) Writing the posts, drawing the pictures, and putting them out into the world with a click of a button has been fascinating; doing this on a daily basis has been both stressful and freeing–yes, it’s been a lot of work, but because of the pace, I have been continually forced to move on from whatever I just did to embarrass myself.
I first want to thank all of you who have followed the blog, or even just occasionally checked in. If you are a regular viewer, you must know that I have an (a) obsessive and (b) moody temperament; this combination has occasionally translated into repetitive and tormented checking of “stats”, a whole new form of masochistic escapism. However, you regular viewers have really done a lot to buoy me up over the last year, you irregular viewers to thrust me into momentary despair. (Ha!)
I especially appreciate your time and interest since, as some of you may have already realized, I am not a natural blogger. Yes, I write and draw fairly quickly, but I don’t really know anything. (Oops! Important caveat – I do know quite a few things in the area of my non-blogged profession.)
But I can’t give advice on household management, money-saving, science or health. I’m not even particularly political, though because a daily blog works a bit like a newspaper column, I tend to sound off in that area.
I’ve said before that my subject is “some overlap of stress and creativity”. (This may be a cipher for “whatever stressed me feels like creating that day”.) But as the year mark passes, I really would like to move more into the area of creativity and a bit further from the area of stress.
This, of course, is easier said than done. And I’m not quite sure what I even mean by it—I hesitate to spell it out yet in the light of that uncertainty.
Any ideas? Suggestions?
Thanks again.
(And as always, check out 1 Mississippi by Karin Gustafson – publicizing that book was the real reason I started the blog, but I’m afraid I haven’t done a very good job of it. It really is a cute book–discounts are readily available if you write me.)
Explore posts in the same categories: BloggingTags: 1 Mississippi by Karin Gustafson, blog birthday, Blogging, manicddaily, ManicDdaily at one year, ManicdDaily colored pencil drawing, paper anniversary
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ManicDDaily 
July 25, 2010 at 6:28 pm
> Any ideas? Suggestions?
Mirror or window? Is a year of blogging a voyage of self-discovery or merely a disciplined act of disclosure, because you already knew the ManicDDaily or KG that we read from the start?
July 25, 2010 at 6:42 pm
I’m not sure that I understand what you mean by that. I’m not stopping after a year, though I feel like it is an interesting “reconsideration” point. To tell the truth, I didn’t know what I would do when I started. I think I thought it would be more about writing and that I might recycle old writing so that the daily thing would be relatively easy to maintain. I’ve ended up doing fairly little recycling, except the occasional old poem (though people seem to prefer those!)
July 25, 2010 at 6:42 pm
PS – disciplined isn’t really a word I’d use!
July 25, 2010 at 7:50 pm
Never meant to suggest or imply your were stopping. Just to ask, given all we’ve learned about you from reading, what have you learned about yourself? If by some magic you could have read your year of blogs before you wrote them, what would have surprised you?
And well, I say “disciplined” if for nothing else the daily aspect, but also perhaps because you seem to overcome, if not basic shyness, then explicitly at least various embarrassments. Certainly there’s discipline involved whenever someone consistently overcomes some aspect of their nature.
July 25, 2010 at 10:59 pm
Yes, that’s true. There’s a discipline in just slogging along.