Only 13 months ago, this blog celebrated its tenth birthday with a whimper. I wrote about how I didn't know if I was still producing any useful material, and hinted at an uncertainty about continuing in an age in which blogs are mostly ignored in favor of video (YouTube) or shorter form (Twitter) content.Well, screw that noise, I guess.
Just yesterday I finished the most prolific period of writing in this blog's now 11-year history. Actually, I should say, the period is not finished, but a break in the action has given me a chance to reflect on it.
The first break in the action in 41 days.
If you've been reading this blog for some time, you may know I have a practice of never posting more than once in a single day. In prolific times, when a lot of different movie thoughts are leaping from my brain into my fingers, this sometimes means I hold back several written pieces at once, until a day without something else planned opens up on my calendar.
Never before, though, have I written something on this blog for 40 consecutive days without a single missed day.
That record streak ended just yesterday, when no new piece traveled from my brain into my fingers on the day after Valentine's Day, even though it was a Saturday, meaning I had more time than usual to write something.
Actually, truth be told, I wrote the post you're reading now yesterday, in anticipation of the fact that I wouldn't write anything yesterday. That's not a Catch-22. As I sensed how long this streak was going, I knew I would write a piece like this whenever it finished. But I could only post it once a day had elapsed without me publishing something. Knowing that would finally happen on Saturday, I got writing.
I don't know that posts on 40 consecutive days is any great feat in the grand scheme of things, as there are likely blogs that dutifully post new content every single day of the year. But me, I've never forced it. Oh, I could have written something yesterday and the streak could have kept going, but I didn't have anything I really wanted to talk about. And only rarely, to break long streaks of inactivity, have I ever forced writing something just for the sake of publishing something new.
The news here is really that for nearly a month-and-a-half, I never had to force it. Each day -- and sometimes for many days in advance -- I had plenty to write about, movie-related thoughts scampering around in my brain and demanding to be committed to permanence, or whatever kind of permanence the internet provides. Thirteen months ago, I never would have imagined that my most fruitful sustained period of writing on this blog still lay ahead of me.
A perfect storm of cinema-related happenings surely assisted with this. From the point when the streak began on January 6th, I had the end of my viewing year to discuss, followed quickly by my posting of my best of 2019 and the two posts that traditionally follow that one. That was immediately followed by three best-of-the-decade posts. Since it was the start of a new year, I also had two separate posts announcing my new monthly and bi-monthly viewing series, plus two actual installments of the former. The Oscars were earlier than usual this year, meaning I then turned my thoughts to them, plus there were also three prominent people who died during this period who I wanted to memorialize. Finally, the period ended with Valentine's Day, a day I always try to recommend some romantic movie to my readers.
At my busiest and most backed up, I had as many as six posts waiting to be published. Now granted, some of those were long-term works in progress, best of the year and best of the decade posts that can't be written in one day. But there were times when I didn't know if I'd ever post certain things I'd written, which were delayed as long as two weeks after I originally wrote them, while other, more urgent material surfaced. At times I felt like a newspaper editor trying to figure out which needed to post now and which could wait for a slower period, without anything losing its sense of timeliness.
It's hard to say what my previous record was, because I broke regularly enough in my updating of this blog that it was never something I had any reason to keep track of. But just scanning the history of this blog, something that is easy enough to do because the total number of posts in each month appear next to it in parenthesis, there were only a few months where I wrote even within three posts of the total number of days in that month, and that never occurred in consecutive months. That pretty much rules out anything over 30 in a row, and my longest streak was surely closer to 20.
Well, it's over now.
That's a joke of sorts -- clearly I am still in this period, effectively. And I could easily start a new streak today and be backed up by three posts only a day or two from now.
But I think it's nice to pause and recognize that this blog is not as dead as I passively proclaimed it last January. Movies have continued to stimulate my writing brain, sometimes more than I can handle, sometimes so urgently that I need to sit down right then and there and write what I'm thinking.
It may still not produce your favorite content to read, but it's keeping me plenty busy and satisfied.
Hallelujah.
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