Tonight is noteworthy because this is the 200th blog post that I’ve published here on MGHerron.com!
A little history will help provide perspective.
I registered this domain and launched the website in December 2013, shortly after I settled on a pen name and began to write and publish fiction seriously. That’s almost four years ago now.
Looking back at the early posts, you can tell what my goal was setting out. It was all about writing and getting published. There was still a lot I didn’t know, but if nothing else at least that much is clear.
The first blog was published on 12/12/2013: The Oxford Comma Makes a Funny.
I shortly followed this up with some modest writing goals a few weeks later, in the form of writing resolutions for 2014 (1/4/201).
Fast forward 4 years
As I’ve published a dozen stories, 3 novels, and a nonfiction book since then, looking back at the beginning is surreal, almost like I’m looking into someone else’s past life instead of my own.
I’ve run personal blogs on and off for a decade before this one, publishing articles and stories and links and quotes and conspiracy theories and code snippets and other various things I was interested in at the time.
But none of those blogs had any staying power. They were all attempts to find myself in some way. Those projects taught me different aspects of writing and critical reasoning and creative collaboration and website management and HTML/CSS and other important skills. Eventually, though, I grew bored or restless of each and moved on to something else.
The biggest downfall of all those previous attempts was that they all lacked direction. This blog, for any failings it might suffer, at least knows what it’s about: my journey as a writer and everything that entails.
My journey, told in my own voice. After four years, I finally feel like I’ve embraced that. That’s liberating in its own way.
So 200 posts is a milestone I’m glad to have reached. I’m grateful to be able to look back and see that I’m a different person than I was then, that I’ve grown, and that I’ve got a few books on the shelf and many hundreds of thousands of words under my belt.
I wonder where I’ll be four years from now…?
Well, there’s no reason to rush it. If you’re not diligent, you blink and life rushes by.
I’m just going to continue being present here, trying to squeeze the most of each day, and be a better writer this year than I was the last.
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