My Writing History

Earlier today, on a facebook group dedicated to bloggers, we were asked to post our favorite thing we have ever written, whether it was relevant to the general theme of the group or not. I did not post a link. I posted a 50 word piece of micro-fiction I wrote back when I was hosting a micro-fiction contest. But here is the thing, that question made me realize how long I have been doing this, how much I have written.

I started on LiveJournal 11 years ago, and my first blog around 6 years ago. Between LJ and the blogs I still have access to, that is almost 3,000 posts. 3,000 posts. 11 years. That is a lot of writing. A lot of history.

And none of this counts my actual fiction, or the poetry I wrote as a child and teen. When I say I cannot NOT write, I mean it. And yet, on nights like tonight, when I arrived at the coffee shop with no idea what I was going to write, it boggles my mind. I have no idea how I put out that much content. Right now I struggle to put out one post a week, maybe two. But according to the numbers, I have, on average, written 3 out of every 4 days for the last 11 years.

Now, a lot of that content was not necessarily good content. I was thinking the other day that I have posted almost nothing about the dogs here on Alien Anthropologists, but I used to post twice a week on Life by Pets. What did I write about? I mean, I know I posted about the hard times – losing Moree, Smokey, and Howie. I wrote about finding Junebug and Larry. Those are good posts. But not all of the posts are good posts.  There are also a lot of picture only posts on that site. I kind of miss taking as many pictures as I used to, but I used to go to the dog park with the camera around my neck nearly every day. Now, I go to the dog park maybe once a month, and the camera is almost always at home.

Kind of the same with the personal finance blog. I tried to write on a schedule. I posted about keeping to my budget and goals every Sunday evening for like two years. Two other times a week I put out content. Some of it was good. Most of it was not.

And looking back at all of this reminds me of why I move to this blog – my “one true blog”. I can post about anything I want – pets, finances, parenting, fiction, etc. And that means that most of the content is better content than it was on the other blogs. It is not all perfect (see this post) because I still try to get one post a week up, and I do not always have something profound to say.

But just like I pulled over all of my book reviews from 100 Words On, maybe I will start pulling over some of the better posts from the old blogs. I cannot read my old writing without making edits, seeing way to make it better, so I will certainly do that. But yeah. I have 3,000 posts worth of history to draw from. Why not mine it.