I’ve Finally Achieved My Dream

Last week I disappeared from the blogosphere for a few days. You may not have noticed. Why would you? I’m not a blogger of any particular consequence. Besides, even though I wasn’t really around, my writing still was, as I made use of the rather helpful ‘scheduling’ feature on WordPress and my posts appeared everyday, almost as if I was posting them myself. They were all written in advance however, as indeed many of my posts are. That’s why they often appear at 5am. I am sometimes awake at 5am, but I’m either comforting a toddler who should really still be asleep, or I’m getting up stupidly early to do exercise. I’m certainly not blogging at 5am.

Since I’ve been back in work in the last fortnight, I’ve tended to exercise in the evenings.

But I still sometimes get up early, because I like to get to work early.

Well, technically that’s not true, I don’t like going to work at all. But if I have to go, then I tend to find it’s quite helpful, from a stress management perspective, if I get there early.

But blogging mostly occurs during holidays and weekends. And, as it turns out, during pandemics. But I didn’t know about that last one until around six months ago.

So, aside from a few intentional daily blogging streaks in the past, which were more about seeing if I could, rather fuelled by any belief that I should, I’ve always tended to post a little haphazardly. But the daily blogging streak that I started this year feels different. It feels like something I can maintain. As long as I don’t let things like ‘quality-control’ get in the way.

But the return of work proper has made me realise that it’s going to be quite difficult and require a lot of advance post-writing. Which is what I did last week.

So if you elected to comment on any of my posts, then I apologise for the late reply. Assuming I did reply. As I write this I haven’t replied to any comments for a few days, but I intend to rectify that momentarily. I also apologise if I haven’t visited your blog in a while. Assuming you have a blog of course. Which you probably do if you’re reading this, because my audience is primarily other bloggers. Well, other bloggers and repetitive algorithms. But I think it’s only the bloggers that actually read my posts. So apologies that I haven’t read your posts of late. I hope to rectify that too, but life appears to be quite busy at the moment.

If nothing else, the return to working at work has made me realise how much I lied to myself about the amount of work I was doing between March and September. I still think I did do quite a lot, but without other people to interact with, I suspect I was more efficient. Which did allow time for blogging. Now though, the government is keen for us all get back to our previous inefficiencies in the name of the economy;

So I will need to find some extra motivation to keep blogging.

And what better motivation could I have than the message I received from WordPress on Friday?

Which was this:

Now if you’d told me back in May 2015, when I first started this blog, that by September 2020 I would have over 1000 followers, I would never have believed you.

Because back in May 2015 I assumed it would happen much more quickly than that. And I also believed that it would be 1000 real people who actually read my blog.

Whereas I obviously now know that that is not the case.

At all.

Still, 1000 followers, real or imaginary, is still a badge of honour of sorts. I mean WordPress have literally given me a badge so it must be significant.

Did I start this post by claiming that I’m not a blogger of any particular consequence?

Well clearly that isn’t true any longer.

Look out ‘big time’ – here I come!