ManicDDaily

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.)