A year and more than a hundred posts

I missed my hundredth post. Well, didn’t miss it as such but I didn’t know that it was No. 100 while I wrote it. But then there are posts in this blog that really don’t count like the one that’s the oldest in the archive (and still in German). That was neither my first post nor the day that marked the birth of this blog for me. I opened my blogger account in May 2005. My husband wanted a website and I said, “Well, but you have to have something that makes people coming back, like news or a blog. Like Neil Gaiman has.” He asked me how to do it, I didn’t know, mumbled something about blogger, and maybe free service, went to my computer, set up an account, wrote something about the weather and my son disclosing the name of the town where I live, went back, opened another account for him, said, “Look here’s your account, this is your password and if you have time I’ll show you how to enter new posts.” That was it.

If you’re interested, his blog is still there, though his website has its own news-page. (And it’s about as easy as entering Fort Knox to post something there, it needs me, my list of passwords and three different account or user names to enter anything. It’s done best with phone assistance by our friend who programmed the whole thing.) Oh, and the whole thing is in German. I still have to translate everything into English and then have our friend do whatever he does to create new pages…

But back to this blog. There was that stray entry in August 2005, and then silence. Think of it as the gestation period of this blog. Nine months of expecting. Then I decided to make the switch to English and this marks what I count as my first official post: language switch. Since then I found a lot of blogs not dull at all. In fact I found so many that I can’t read them all if I want to do something else in my life than reading blogs. The first glimpse of what a community there was, I had when I joined blogher. Back then this blog was still called “Diapers and Music”. I started blogging away enthusiastically and then stopped to think about who on earth would want to read this. As those of you with blogs of your own know it is a bit of work. And I wanted to be read, otherwise I could have stayed with my paper journal.

When I started telling friends about the blog just to gain a handful of readers another problem emerged: most of them wouldn’t read something in English. But then, most people browsing the blogher blogrolls wouldn’t read something in German. Dilemma. I solved it in true Susanne-fashion, I did both. The twin to this blog, its German mirror was born 8 days later: “Windeln und Musik“. As of December 1, 2006 diapers vanished from my life. I renamed the blog. It’s very hard to come up with something that works in German and in English. My husband suggested “Reflexionen aus einem beschädigten Leben”, “Reflections from a damaged life”, which sounds great but a little too pessimistic for my taste. Even if it has something to do with Theodor W. Adorno. (It’s the subtitle of his “Minima Moralia“.) My life doesn’t feel that damaged though.

So I changed the name to “creative.mother.thinking”. Creativity and parenting are the cornerstones of this blog and obviously I’m always writing about what I’m thinking. I’m not that sure about the dots any more. Maybe they are silly. Preposterous. Do you think I should get rid of them? Name it “creative mother thinking”? Maybe I should.

Anyway. It’s been a year. A year of blogging, a year of walking through my day mentally composing blog entries all the time and actually writing about every third of them. For months I felt lonely with my blog. I had about 3 readers, well, 3 hits a day and 95% of people stayed only one second or less. I have spent more time on this blog than I ever thought possible, I have translated every post bar one, and have contemplated giving it up for the sake of my music about every other month.

During the last months readers have gotten up, this blog’s technocrati ranking has gotten up to 147,303 and I feel like I’m part of a community. I have found friends like De and Liv, and I even was part of a big blogger wedding for social justice. I found out that writing is more precious to me than I though and embarked on NaNoWriMo. Through which I found friends who live a little closer to me. So, yes, as much as I doubted it as first, blogging really is a social activity. It took me from sitting in my house in suburbia feeling lonely and disconnected to sitting in my house in suburbia feeling part of a community filled with friends. Sometimes I even get out and meet them in person. Mostly I don’t. One of the reasons being that I can’t just take a plane and travel halfway around the world. But then nowadays the world comes to me through my little computer screen.

And to complete all this I have to say that I started yet another thing I don’t have time or energy for. When I did NaNo I thought to myself, “Why isn’t there such a thing for songwriters?” Well, surprise, there is: FAWM. As in February album writing month. 14 songs in 28 days. I plan to fail spectacular since a) I signed up one week late, b) I have written all of three or four songs in all my life, c) I don’t even had the time to translate my last blog post for the whole week, and d) I just have to make rest and sleep a priority right now because otherwise I’ll keel over. Nonetheless I signed up and wrote almost a whole song during the last week. It only needs some lyrics thrown at its bridge…

And don’t forget to check out the Just Post posts:

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