Four Years

Four years ago, I posted the first entry on this blog, a simple dictionary definition of the title. The next day, I said what I thought the whole thing was about. Then I posted a review of my friend Jim Kelly's story "Mother".

I had no idea what I was doing, in every sense of that phrase.

What most amazes me is how much has changed in four years. I feel like a grizzled old man, because way back then we didn't have all these fancy-shmancy interfaces -- we had to learn some HTML code! (I can just imagine what those of you who've been doing this for 10 years or more think of us whippersnappers...) Litblogs were few and far between. Not many people were blogging about science fiction in particular, which is what I started with, though soon I ended up throwing in whatever I happened to be reading or thinking about.

According to Blogger, there are 936 posts here so far (with this being the 937th). The wordcount must be in the hundreds of thousands. The archives are full of things that seem to me now to be wrongheaded ideas, stabs in the dark, ridiculous assertions, embarrassingly naive statements, pure nonsense, unjustifiable claims, unfortunate phrasings, numerous bits of unadulterated stupidity, and the occasional sentence or paragraph or even entire post that is a pleasant surprise. Blog posts are first drafts, and I don't know what ever possessed me to want to put my first drafts out there for the world to see, but despite some very awkward moments along the way (and more to come, I'm sure), I'm glad I did, for many reasons, not the least of which is that it's opened up a whole community in the real world for me, a community of people passionate about reading and writing, which is something I'd longed to find.

So thank you to everybody who occasionally stops by to read what crazy thing I've come up with today.

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