I had so much fun with those tables yesterday that I decided to do still more number crunching, on that time-tested blog topic, the blogiversary!

It was just over three years ago, on March 24, 2002, when I completed the initial setup on the just-released Movable Type 2 and posted my first entry, a pentimento to be developed into an opera known as “Mr. Red Ears.” The piece had originally erupted unbidden in my email to good friend and returned-to-the-East-Coast stand-up comedian Ken Goldstein, who liked it enough to repost.

At about the same time, Eric Sinclair had also begun to experiment with this newfangled bloggy thing. I had long hesitated in the shadow of my locquaciousness, avoiding the call of the pen but suspecting I might take to it. The blog appeared to offer a laboratory setting and once I was off, I was off.

Since then I have held editorial positions at two nationally-distributed magazines and written for regional and special-interest press sparsely but regularly. I think I understand the process, and I have confidence in my ability to develop a story professionally and on deadline. None of this would have happened without the blog, and at least one editor called me to comission a story based at least partly upon awareness of my work stemming from the site.

My bandmate Greg recently challenged my self-perceptions on these matters. I don’t think of myself as a writer in the way that I once thought of myself as an artist. He pointed out that my stumblebum determination to date has served me well and that realistically, the experiment has panned out. He has strongly encouraged me to shed my diffidence about identifying with the activity as a profession and to proceed aggressively toward attempting to earn a living from writing. I am still taken aback by the viewpoint but I must admit his arguments were forceful and correct.

At any rate, after tweaking this loonnng list, I was able to plop some data into Excel and get some basic metrics going.

I wrote about this once before, much longer ago than I had thought; it was well before I had been doing this for a full year.

My longest entry is one that came in the midst of what is still the strongest writing on the site: September 1988, part four, 4265 words and posted on September 20, 2002. It’s one of a four-or-five part series chronicling the death of my sister in 1988, and written with the deliberate intention of causing the reader’s personal grief to chime with my own, I hope in a cathartic and thoughtful way.

As I was writing it, advance publicity for the Wilco film I am Trying to Break Your Heart suffused my mediasphere, and the phrase stuck with me. I had just started my job with my first magazine as their online news editor (essentially a news blogger with a quota of ten daily items). I wrote the series in a frenzy, intercutting my pursuit and evaluation of the most trivial entertainment news with an attempt at serious personal investigation and excavation.

The other thing that ran through my mind that grim September, on the first anniversay of the Al Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington, was my sister’s example as a writer. In the too-short time between her high-school career and her death, she filled countless notebooks with writing of all sorts – poetry, fiction, scholastic research, journals.

I’ve still only read some of it. But one thing she wrote stuck with me as I wrote of her passage.

“I don’t beleive in writing hard anymore,” she’d recorded sometime near her death. She went on to note that emulating Kerouac was an immature writer’s strategy and that she had no intention of trying to do so any further. She had been there, done that, and moved on. Instead she intended to write as an adjunct and reflective activity.

While writing September, 1988 definitely involved “writing hard,” I was cognizant of my sister’s dictum, of not mistaking the writing for life itself. To me that has meant both a desire to maintain a clear awareness of craft and narrative strategy in my professional work, to what success I cannot say, and a commitment to writing informally here. To which you owe the pleasure of my occasional vocabularist infelicties and tpyos.

So, whoever you are, thanks for coming. I have no intention of slowing down, and Greg’s points are worthy of consideration. Check in three years from now and let’s see what’s transpired!