2000 Posts

This is my 2000th post at Wash Park Prophet, which is now about a week short of a year and a half old.

On top of this blog, I have also posted a couple of hundred stories at Colorado Confidential (some of which, like a list of endorsements in the state, were regularly updated for a prolonged period), a small number of posts at Wash Park Poet (about 165 text pages worth, although most were written before I started Wash Park Prophet and only modestly editted before publishing them online), and a number of diaries at Daily Kos, Square State and Colorado Pols in this time period.

This is over 4 posts a day, every day, for the past year and a half. While I don't necessarily agree with one fellow blogger's characterization of my posts as "long winded," I do like to write in paragraphs rather than sentence fragments attached to links. It isn't unusual for a Wash Park Prophet post or Colorado Confidential story to have several hundred words.

On top of these posts and diaries, I've made often lengthy comments on other people's posts and diaries at those blogs, and several others, including a number of comments at Creative Destruction, SCOTUS blog, various law profs blogs, and the Physics Forums, have contributed to both dkospedia and Wikipedia, and have done a little copy editing of the free fiction Kelley Armstrong makes available at her website.

In addition I have written often lengthy responses to e-mail from readers and fellow Colorado Confidential writers with questions and comments, spent considerable time on the Internet looking for new stories to write about, helped with some state legislative issues, and done a day job as an attorney in a small firm, which also involves a lot of typing.

On top of this I've written 360 pages in long hand journals since this blog began, written quite a few miscellaneous ideas in lengthy computer documents that never ended up as blog material and was never included in a long hand journal, and have had a very small anonymous online writing project.

It is too much. I could certainly continue to generate new ideas at the same pace, despite some rare dry spells, which are terrifying. It is also nice to no longer have countless bankers boxes and file cabinet drawers filled with little scraps of paper with ideas written on them, as I had for years before I started blogging. But, I don't think it is good for my continuing physical health to do so much writing. I am feeling the very early stages of repetitive stress injury in my hands, and if I don't take some pretty bold action to address it, I will pay dearly for that choice. It also simply takes too much time do to this somewhat scatter shot kind of writing, which should probably be more focused on writing more polished and longer pieces for old fashioned print publications, and on getting more exercise (suffice it to say that I weigh a lot more than I did when I graduated from high school).

In 2007, I'll be scaling back my participation at Colorado Confidential, and also plan on cutting back the amount that I post here and elsewhere.

This is not a Goodbye Cruel World post. I'm not discontinuing Wash Park Prophet (although my New Year's Resolutions include an upgrade of this blog to a different platform than old style Blogger, in addition to some other nuts and bolts issues like a possible conversion of my laptop to Linux and some neglected virus protection software installation on another home computer). And, I'm not planning to end my association with Colorado Confidential either, although I will write there less often.

I may even increase my fiction writing a little to the point where it is a regular weekly activity, although not nearly as much as I'm decreasing my other kinds of writing. And, another of my New Year's Resolutions is to get an article or two, at least, published in print.

As always, feel free to add any comments you may have on meta issues related to this blog. Comments are always, well, almost always, appreciated.