Unlike many people I worked straight through the pandemic. I wasn’t furloughed, but I did reduce to a shorter working week for a while - keeping myself busy by persuing interests that I had been studiously avoiding - among them the “Couch to 5K” running escapade, and trying my hand at writing.
You’re probably frowning already - doesn’t the blog count as writing? I suppose it does, but in my head it’s not really the same as proper writing - the kind that essayists, journalists, novellists, script writers, and so on create (the more I describe the workings of my own head, the more crazy I sound).
Anyway. Inbetween half-killing myself around the town in running shoes I started posting bits and pieces to a relatively well known online publishing platform called “Medium”, which offered a rather crafty route towards fame, riches, and independent wealth (har har). I brought Grammarly to bear on my words and quickly learned to avoid being told off by it - which circuitously improved my grammar and punctuation enormously.
I made bank immediately. I’m not sure how - but I did - and then fell into the trap that I suspect all prospective writers, miners, farmers, fisherman, or whatever else fall into - I started chasing my own tail. If one article could make “this much”, then obviously lots of articles could make “that much” (they didn’t but we won’t get into that today). Suffice to say something that had been fun and spontaneous became increasingly dull, and improbably difficult.
You know something else? It turns out the written word on the internet has an incredibly short tail. If you ever manage to bottle lightning (and I did, more than once), it vanishes as quickly as it arrives. It’s quite dispiriting really.
After leaving the writing to gather dust for a couple of years, I finally decided to do something with it this week - and leveraged Wordpress’s relatively new-found ability to import anything and everything.
I think this is where some people write “TLDR”.
There are now two “categories” in the blog - “Life”, and “Thoughts”. All of the more journalistic/soapbox/opinionated waffle now lives under “Thoughts” - there’s a link at the top of the blog. Everything else is filed under “Life” - which again has a link at the top.
Having imported and tidied everything up, I felt incredibly smug and sat back with a coffee to admire my own handywork. And that’s when I remembered a piece of programming I wrote some time ago that would turn the text version of my blog archive back into a Wordpress import file.
Ten minutes later I imagine warning lights blinked into life in Matt Mullenweg’s office - warning him that a denial of service attack might be going on. No - not denial of service - just the arrival of twenty years worth of blog posts in the middle of the Wordpress server farm - in much the same manner that Godzilla tends to arrive.
Boom. (cue screaming, running, and general mayhem)
So yes.
There is now an “Archive” link at the top of the blog, leading to each of the last twenty years of my stories aboard the ball of mud we all share. I can’t imagine anybody might want to read it all - but you never know. I’m trying to avoid dipping a toe myself, because I suspect it will be a bit like tidying up the attic - you pull out one shoe-box full of stuff, and half a day disappears while you vanish into all manner of memory laden rabbit-holes.