O.M.G.! One Thousand Four Hundred Sixty One Days!

Memorial Day weekend 2008 started like every other weekend: me sitting on the couch on the backyard deck, goofing around with my computer and pretty much vegging out.

However, the goofing on the computer wasn't my normal run-of-the mill goofing. Normal run-of-the mill goofing primarily consisted of trolling the chat rooms and surfing the 'net. On that particular weekend though, my goofing around consisted of giving serious thought to a piece of advice that a former chat room bud of mine gave to me earlier in the week.

So I spent part of the afternoon not only thinking about the advice but acting on it as well. I went to the website, picked out a template, tweaked it, thought about a name, get the addy for the name {most important lesson learned was to never, repeat, never choose an addy that is 23 letters in length}, moved my cursor over to the "publish" button and then...nothing.

I froze.

Why?

Because I was about to take a huge leap. Up until that weekend, I was content to simply while away my time being a notorious somebody in the chat rooms {still am to this day, even though I haven't been there in about a year}, and write mediocre stories. But after thinking about it some more, and realizing that a blog would be a perfect for my stories and my writings, I hit the "publish" button.

And nothing happen.

I quickly realized that it would probably help if I actually put something up to let people know about me. Thus the legendary introduction post made its appearance, which was titled Greetings and Salutations!. And thus, a brand new blog was born.

Cedar's Mountain.

Like most new endeavors I happen to undertake, I have a tendency to jump body first into it, and doing a blog proved to be no exception, at least during that first year. I immediately put myself on a punishing posting schedule: two posts per day, every other day. Whatever struck my fancy, I wrote about. I did this for about four months and as most of you can attest to, it was the fastest way that one could accomplish burn out.

September '08 brought the first of many changes that not only Cedar's Mountain would experience, but I would as well. That change consisted of dropping to one post every other day. That particular change lasted for about a year, before burnout forced me to change to a M-W-F format that has lasted, in one form or another, for the past three years.

But that wasn't the only change that I would experience during my four years of blogging and writing.

In late 2008, I became enamored of flash fiction, mostly because of the positive feedback I got from this particular piece of creative non-fiction, and in the spring of '09, a new blog called Flashing Georgie's Shorts was born.

2009 proved to be my most creative year as I wrote about 50+ short stories for that blog. The bulk of the stories that I wrote for the blog were average and I had no problem publishing. However, the were a few that I wrote, that had a lot of potential, and those were held back. At the moment, of those half dozen stories that were held back, one has been published {of which the link can be found on the front page} while the rest have undergone minor-to-major tweaking to make them publishable.

The short story blog lasted until the early spring of 2010, when burnout and paranoia about plagiarism forced me to close it. But yet, even though I was down to two blogs {book blog was created to sell my self pubbed book}, it wouldn't last for long.

In early May 2010, another obsession knocked my door and asked to be let in. I looked around for few minutes to see what was around, then invited the obsession in, and thus, blog #4 was born, Shooting Suburbia. This nifty little photo blog of mine celebrated its two year anniversary in May and I'm gunning to make it a third, as soon as I can find some time to shoot a few videos.

By late 2010, I was again thinking about creating another blog, with the main reason being that as much as I like ranting and posting off the wall stuff, I was getting tired of putting up a disclaimer warning people of the potential for being offended by a particular post of mine. So I created blog #5 that was originally called "Partially Yours" but now called It's Always Saturday In Suburbia that would be what I'm found of calling a "junk blog". And to make it easier on me when it came to putting a disclaimer on a post warning people, I put a page in front of it that required you to answer "yes" or "no" before continuing. Even though the posting has been very sporadic on that blog, it still remains the home for my R & NC-17 rated ramblings and short story snippets.

In 2011, nothing much happened on the blog front. In between bouts of writing and querying, I was still posting like a fiend on this one and posting sporadically on the other two.

In 2012, it was almost the same old same old, in that while I was still posting like a fiend in between bouts of writing, the posts themselves weren't really up to my usual high standards of quality. Now if you couple that with some of the crap that I was going through this year, you'd be surprised to know that I was giving serious consideration to closing up shop and saying my goodbyes during the spring.

But, as they say, when new things happen in one aspect of life, a trickle down effect can occur. I sold a book in February, and the trickle down effect is that I'm getting my third wind for blogging.

So let's celebrate the fact that not only is this my one thousand four hundred sixty first day of blogging and this is combined post number one thousand thirty two, but I managed to stick to writing a blog to begin with.

I am truly blessed to have such good readers and good friends as you, who have crossed paths with my blogs, either as a drive by or as a permanent stop on your cyber journey for the past four years. Without all of you, I'm not quite sure that I would be having the success and adventure that I'm experiencing now.

Here's to another three hundred sixty four days of blogging, and as always, I thank you for your support.