I’ve managed to post something on this blog almost every day (I think I missed two, perhaps three days) since September 14, 2021, so for about thirteen and a half months. I think for reasons I’ll step back from that and post here less frequently, but more substantially.
Why did the daily posts begin? This particular blog, on a dedicated server with my own URL, began in 2013, just a few months after my layoff from my 30-year career at Rocketdyne. I posted on the blog irregularly for many years, some months posting two times, others 20 or 30 times, and sometimes posting three or four short posts on a single day.
The discipline of daily posting began a few weeks after I was released from the hospital following my heart transplant, on June 16,2021, as I gradually resumed the routines and projects I had been working on over the previous several years. (I had even resumed writing for Black Gate, on a biweekly basis, as I’d done for a year and half, but the frequency of follow-up medical visits made keeping the BG schedule difficult, so I stepped away again.) Perhaps I decided to make the daily blog schedule a point of discipline given my recovered health, just as I had made it a point of discipline to maintain Locus Online as a responsible, professional website with daily posts from June 2010 all the way until October 2017, when Locus HQ decided they no longer needed my services.
Lately I’ve realized that I’m probably spending too much time tracking and commenting on news of the day, especially politics, and as important it is for various reasons for people to be aware of politics and social issues of the day, there is lots of commentary already out there, and perhaps I should focus more on my own particular interests. (I even worry that casual browsers who come to my blog for my reviews of books, say, may be put off by the political focus of so many of my posts. Not that I care too much; I never track how many readers I get here.)
So I think I will step away from doing daily posts. I will stop compiling so many links from the daily news — or perhaps gather them into weekly summaries with the links embedded in a broader discussion, as David Brin does, for example here.
My daily routine is to sit down by 4:30pm and spend an hour or so writing up one thing or another for a blog post. Often links I’ve saved from earlier in the day, or links from previous weeks that I gather together by theme. I will wind that down. Instead I’ll spend that hour at 4:30 working blog content that may take two or three days to finish — in particular, summaries of books I’ve read, recently or to catch up on titles from months or years ago, in order to gradually build a repository (an *indexed library*) of such reviews. So, posts of those sorts might appear once or twice a week. Posts compiling less-political, more philosophical topics, maybe once a week. And perhaps a summary of political/social/cultural topics once a week. So still a post every couple days.
We’ll see how it goes. Tomorrow, the last day of the month, I’ll do one more roundup of links I’ve collected in recent days. And then enter November with a new… demeanor.
