Three more – for various definitions of three.

I have three more posts to make to complete my ‘year of daily posts’ – and this one doesn’t count, you’ll either be pleased or saddened to hear. I’m still torn as to when and how these will be written. I prefer the spontaneity of making the post on the day but I am very tempted by the thought of sitting around tomorrow morning to put the remaining two (by then) in the bag.

I’ll be very interested to see how much I will post after this is over. I may take Gas station without pump’s approach and publish a similar or greater number of words in a less scheduled way or I may fall completely silent. Right now I have no idea at all, which is fun and a bit scary at the same time, like almost all interesting things.

I’ve seen my fair share of abandoned blogs – you know the ones “Here is where I will detail my travels through my PhD” and the last post was back in 2006, it was only the third post and it amounted to “my brain, it hurts”. But life gets in the way and these blogs are the same as the diaries, started on January 1st, that start with “Wow, here’s my yearly diary! Every day I’m going to write something positive!” and wind up, a week later, as drink coasters or propping up the wonky sofa in the study. Life gets in the way.

Death gets in the way, too. I was reading someone’s LiveJournal years ago when they were diagnosed with cancer and the journal continues until their (far too early) death, with the final reflections of that person’s life taking place in other LJs, visible as a permanent artefact. I reread that LiveJournal, from first to last, earlier this year, to remind myself of a person who I had only known through this mechanism and, even knowing what the ending was going to be, the post where she announces that the test results had come back, and that it was cancer, shocked and upset me, almost to the point of throwing up. This vibrant, excited person, deeply in love with someone and working through all of the bits and pieces that happens when you and the person you love are in different countries, no longer updates their LiveJournal but it is still there. I have too many of these dormant LiveJournals on my list now. Death gets in the way, too.

This whole year, the good, the bad, the thoughtful, the preachy, the plain dumb and ill-informed, will stay here until this data corpus fries or the company gets sold to someone who wants to charge money for access or some such, but while it does that, it will reach more people than any other form of small-scale self-publishing has every achieved up until now. And while I have made some mistakes, it’s wrong to remove them just because I was wrong, as long as I’ve corrected them or noted where they should be corrected to be right.

This has been a part of my life. I wonder what role it will have from January 1st, 2013?