In God’s name and under the stars, what for? –Jack Kerouac On the Road

It seemed to be a good idea at the time. — The Magnificent Seven

I really need to be more careful about getting inspired by friends.

A year ago, a friend of mine was coming to the end of a year long project to write a blog post every day. In a fit of madness, I decided that was a good idea and started doing it myself on February 20, 2014.

Today marks the end of that the year and the start of a crisis about what to do next.

I’m still amazed I managed to pull it off without missing a post (there were days, though, there were days). I did make a few changes along the way. I started going to bed at 11 which cut down my writing time. I also started shortening my minimum word count to 300 words instead of the original 400.

At times it has been a struggle, especially this past week. Last night’s post, in particular, was a bunch of crap that came to me after staring at the screen for nearly 20 minutes and thinking about the quote that started this post. (It’s probably my worse post, although that’s debatable.)

Sitting down to write without having a topic ready has actually happened several times. Sometimes I’ve been pleased with the posts, most of the time not.

Readership, according to analytics, has been small but consistent with periodic bursts of readership, usually as a result of something I’ve done on another site.

On three occasions, WordPress has crashed as I pressed “Publish” and I’ve lost the post and had to start over. No, I didn’t learn to save as I went along and, no, I didn’t copy the text before hitting publish, just in case. It brings to mind the old saying:

Fool me once, shame on you;
Fool me twice, shame on me:
Fool me thrice, I’m a moron.

Something like that.

Now, as I start the second year, I’ve got a few changes in mind. My goal is to keep up the daily posts, but the nature of the posts will change. Now that I’m not worried about losing track of which post I’m on, I’ll start doing multiple posts each day. I’ll publish a few photos and start doing  book reviews and product reviews (probably fountain pens and pen related goods). I’ll also start posting articles from other sites I find interesting and or amusing. I hope to keep my own content going and will do at least one such post a day, but probably a lot shorter than what I’ve been doing.

At least once a week, maybe twice, I’ll do a much longer post.

Eventually, I will assemble the Albania posts and the Japan posts as an ebook of some sort.

In the end, I’m glad I did it. I wasn’t always happy writing the posts, but I was always happy to have written them. I think there are more pearls than swine here, but I’m not necessarily the best judge of that.

Thanks to all of you who’ve followed along for the entire year, and to those who have commented on Facebook or on this site.

I hope you’ll stick around.