Third Year's the Charm

And just like that, this blog is three years old.

It's not exactly three years old, of course. "To the Tale, and Other Such Concerns" turned three years old on September 13, 2007, at a time when I was out of town on a company teambuilding activity. By some strange coincidence, I've missed every single one of these anniversaries -- for the first two years, I assumed that I kicked things off on a September 18 instead of the actual date. Now I know better, but it seems that I still can't keep a proper timeline.

As of September 13, my post count stood at 494 -- just a shade below the magical 500. That counts every article I've started up over the past year, whether I actually published it or let it remain a draft. For a month-by-month breakdown:

September: 8 (out of 17 total)
October: 10
November: 10
December: 12
January: 12
February: 11
March: 10
April: 10
May: 10
June: 10
July: 10
August: 11
September: 7

That's 131 total published posts over the last year... which is actually less than my 135-post output in Year Two. My new work life has hit my blogging habits quite hard... but ever since I imposed a ten-posts-per-month quota on myself, I've managed to regulate my writing somewhat. Nevertheless, a lot of my recent posts tend to go up at odd hours of the night.

I'm honestly not sure how I managed to sneak in that extra post last August, especially considering my current workload. Maybe something misfired somewhere. I suppose that I'll only be able to make conclusions once I see how the numbers for September come in.

The last year also saw quite a few posts that I started writing, but never finished for any number of reasons. These drafts usually remain in limbo until such time that I look through them and decide to resurrect one or two old ideas. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I did just that over the past year... only I can't remember which posts were the results of my misplaced nostalgia. I do know that I now have the following on "incomplete" status, though:

- The first draft of "The Final Interview" (which I promptly forgot about, and thus rewrote completely from scratch for submission to Philippine Genre Stories);
- The lost third installment to my series of writings on Talecraft, as well as two pieces of fiction written for the game;
- One piece of Antaria fiction;
- One piece of independent fiction;
- A essay that questioned why we bother separating "classy" highbrow writings from "peasant" lowbrow writings;
- Two scripts for short comics. To be honest, I'm still wondering who I intended to contact for artist duties here, if I was planning to contact anybody at all.

There's a lot of fiction up there, and it reflects my habit of leaving drafts alone to fend for themselves. In fact, I don't even have any intention of finishing some of the pieces of fiction up there -- at best, I'll probably post excerpts of them in later writings. For now, however, I simply have other things to write.

So now I'm entering my fourth year. I honestly didn't expect to make it this far, but I suppose that I couldn't have done it without the support and criticism of anyone who's ever read through this blog. Now I thank everyone for any number of things -- I thank you for being patient enough to put up with my wordiness, I thank you for being nice enough to tolerate alternate periods of depression and utter insanity, and I thank you for taking the monthly disclaimers seriously despite knowing how silly they are.

Now I have to get back to writing. There's still that 500th post to put together, I think. And after that, there's the question of surviving long enough to reach my fourth year. And even then, the spectre of work and life constantly lurks behind everything, waiting for the first uncertain glance, or the first false move.

Darn it, the keyboard's stuck again...