End of Year

I started Nobody In Particular back in the Winter of 2006. I'm not sure if that's not as long ago as it feels, or longer ago. It's a sign of being old, I guess. In any event, in my first full month of writing, January of 2007, I posted thirteen times. Which seemed like a reasonable number, so I decided that I would post thirteen times a month.

I don't claim to be the most logical person you'll ever meet.

In any event, for the first three years of the blog, I wound up with an average of 13 or more posts every month, but often feel short of that number on a monthly basis. July of 2007 was particularly sparse, with only 7 posts that month. For the record, I do go back and read some of them from time to time. Not the best idea in the world. I've changed a lot in the intervening timeframe, and late 2000s me wasn't always a pleasant person. Still, I suppose the only way to know how far one has traveled is to have a record of where one has been.

But back to the point. This is my first post for October 2020, and it's the one-hundred and fifty-sixth post of the year. Twelve times thirteen, or a bit less than a quarter ahead of schedule. I suppose that I could set a higher target cadence, but I will admit to liking being able to skip two days in a row now and again, even if I don't take advantage of it as often as I should.

The point behind Nobody In Particular was to make me a better writer. Or, to be more precise, to train myself to be better, and faster, as translating my thoughts into text. I've worked a lot of jobs that require me to write and/or maintain a good bit of documentation, and I've always thought of myself as a poor writer. And, to be honest, something of a poor typist. For all of my effort, I could never learn to touch-type. But it turns out that if one uses the hunt-and-peck method long enough, one gets to the point of having muscle memory for where all the keys are. I can type without constantly looking at the keyboard, while only using pretty much two fingers... well, as long as I'm on a "standard-sized" keyboard, anyway. I suspect that there's something farcical about that.

Has it worked? I have no idea. But I have learned what it takes to become better at something. Feedback. And I didn't really set myself up to get any on this platform. Back when Google Plus was still in operation, I would summarize things there, which did provide some feedback. But it was mostly of the "I like this" or "You're an idiot" variety, rather than commenting on how well or poorly it was written. But I keep at it. I'm not sure why. I don't know that I enjoy it as much as posting something nine days out of every twenty for well over a decade would seem to indicate. And, to be honest, I have no idea how much longer this will go. Not in the sense that I'll suddenly decide to stop, but in the sense that I don't have an end in mind; I don't know when the blog will accomplish what I want it to accomplish. I'll just have to see.