Geez, that's pretty hard to believe. When I started this blog way back in the Dark Ages (2009 - we didn't even have "Game of Thrones" yet) it was for the sole purpose of having a platform for my nascent writing career. My (published) high school valedictorian had recommended I start a blog as a stepping stone to getting published, and so at around the same time as I sat down and googled "how to get published" I also googled "how to start a blog."
And the result was this misbegotten mess, named after an obscure Bulgakov quote and with a mission statement of dazzling the world with my unpublished (and unpublishable) manuscripts. I remember thinking at the time (I'm not even exaggerating) that a time would never come when I would run out of trunk scripts to throw up as free original content, and so I went off cracking with a daily posting schedule, which quickly became five days a week. As things turned out, I ran out of manuscripts in mid-2010, which was when we switched from posting five days a week to a more reasonable 3-days a week, off and on. 2015 has been the only year since then I've made a conscientious effort to stick to that schedule and not to just fudge it or flip over to a T-Th schedule every few weeks when I feel like it.
The blog's evolved a lot since that original mandate, not unlike my Twitter feed. (Anybody remember when I used to tweet fake fortune cookies? Haven't done it in an age and a half.) There have been long stretches when I flailed for meaning. In 2013 I transformed it into the home base for the Hundie Challenge. That was the same year the gods conspired to ensure that I would get published, and hence would curse myself endlessly for not taking the Hundie Challenge in 2012, as I had always intended to.
So 2013 was a transformative year. It was the first year I started taking on guests, which was a transformative decision in and of itself. For one thing, I love being able to showcase other people, and having a platform where I can hopefully do a little good for another human being. On the other hand, it saves me from having to constantly generate original content. (Although, if I'm being honest, I spend a LOT of time researching my guests before I interview them, so it may actually be less trouble to just write a damn blogpost myself.)
2014 didn't have a special theme, but 2015 has been my Year of Interviewing Dangerously. I don't know why, but previously I always thought of guest posts as something that should stay within a certain wheelhouse. Basically folks should ask for my help, folks about at my level in the publication process. But for some reason in 2015 I realized that I could ask, well, any-goddamned-body to be on my blog. And a lot of people are so flattered just to be asked, that they don't even realize what a scam it is. So I've had actors, big-time authors, musicians, and even television showrunners on my humble old blog, which has, to be frank, sent my readership into the stratosphere. So don't expect that to stop any time soon. I'm hoping that just by dint of the fact that I'm a thoughtful host who does well-researched interviews of people who create things that I really care about, that this blog might just become a place where creative types like to be interviewed. Hey, crazier things have happened.
So, here we are. One thousand blog posts. A giga. A kilo. A K. Won't you join me for a thousand more?
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