This blog started five years ago today. In that time, I’ve made 280 posts, pretty much one a week. I’ve also made 404 posts on the utownwriting.com blog, which was started on May 6, 2007.

I learned that kind of discipline from Al Schroeder (among other places). He used to have an online journal called Nova Notes, which he updated every single day. Because I think that’s one of the most important things in any kind of writing: the discipline to sit down and do it on a regular schedule. Now Al does a web comic called Mindmistress, which he updates three times a week, plus other projects. He’s been doing Mindmistress since 2002, and in the process the art has improved from this to this.

Plus, of course, I learned from Dave Sim and Cerebus. (Speaking of which, I was sure I did a blog post when Dave Sim reached the 300th and final issue of Cerebus, but I can’t find the post. I think it was before I actually had the blog. Now I need to locate it and post it.)

I started making my writing available online twenty years ago, back on the BBSs, and then on the internet some time later. My movie review site (www.u-town.com/movietown) has been up since 1999, and I had sites before that.

I said in that first entry that I wasn’t selling the novels, that I was giving them away (but keeping copyright, of course). Well, now I am selling A Sane Woman (for those who prefer real books), and I’m going to look into making it available for the Kindle, too. But I’m still giving it away as well.

Later: I was sure I’d written about the final issue of Cerebus, so I looked around, and I found a web page I’d sort of forgotten about. It was sort of a blog that I wrote before I had a real blog, just a series of posts in a long HTML file. I added those posts to this blog, with their correct dates, and you can see them here.

Even Later: Weirdly enough, since one of the old pieces I just posted here was about 9/11, this post ended up being #911 in the database (see the URL up there). Not that I’ve made 911 posts, but the database includes drafts and other things. But it’s still a weird coincidence.

Still Yet Even Later, Already: This question of persistence and determination reminds me of this post, also.