Thirteen Years and a Hundred Posts

I’m imagining a secret society for people who have published over one hundred blog posts, and because this is my head space, I name this society The Hundredfold Order of the Indie Quill. I will be carried on a palanquin, on the backs of those who have published less than a hundred, onto a platform ringed with giant braziers, held up by marble statues in the pose of Atlas holding up the heavens and which also incredibly look like me. The master of ceremonies would look out onto a hushed congregation at length, and then turn to me and say,

“Freely you have given unto us, thy ink–such as it is, imbued with nary sagacity nor originality. Yet thou persistedst with idle flourish and deliberate accumulation, through these one hundred posts. Thus have you earned passage into these hallowed halls, and thus I name thee, newly ascended bearer of the Indie Quill.”

I would lower my brow, so they could place on my head the laurel wreath of the Indie Quill, and I would firstly thank my family, my friends, Blossom’s Book Store, India Coffee House, Richard Stallman and Red Label’s Nature Cure brand of masala tea .

One hundred is a nice round number, a benchmark, like batting a century and I figure there should be a post to commemorate it, though taking 13 years to arrive at this juncture piddles on my glory a little.

This post, the one you’re reading, is post one hundred and one. My first post was in 2012, when I purchased this domain name. I really didn’t know what I wanted to write about (I still don’t). I thought I may use it as a art and design portfolio, but that didn’t happen. It became a place to write¹.

I did not write here between the years 2015 and 2018,which coincides with my switching to Linkedin, which I thought at the time made a decent writing platform, and that I may find the audience I was looking for. I’ve learnt my lesson on that score.

Up until last year, my website ran on Wordpress, until I made the shift to Hugo in August. Wordpress actually worked really well, though it took me some time to evolve a decent workflow. I eventually figured out that writing out the post as a markdown file and then directly pasting it into Wordpress was the best way.

One thing that tripped me up was that I only seem to find errors after I publish to the website. Hugo’s preview function is great for visualising the finished website.

I like to think I have a decent workflow now. I use Emacs to write in Markdown format, and publish using Hugo. I generated a bunch of functions that let me do everything website related from within Emacs. From creating a post, inserting media, launching Hugo’s preview server, building and FTP’ing the files onto my server–everything in Emacs.

I have come to love sitting at my desk² to write because of how finely I’ve customised this text editor. I can no longer see the tool when I’m writing. No horse below and no rider above, all there are, are words.

I treat this website like my sketchbook–I just chuck whatever is on my mind at it. When I write essays ³, I write like I argue with a friend. When I’m feeling juvenile, I write scatacoitic word salads without filters. Sometimes I have the urge to tell stories, and when I’m uninspired, I write journal-like entries on banal things like setting up a book-keeping system and so whatever it is I write, I like that I write. Writing, like drawing., makes me happy.

One person on Linkedin told me that my writing was problematic because I was writing with no focus. No theme, no single subject of expertise. I was spitting out words any time I felt like it and I realised that I didn’t want to stop, and I remembered that I still had this website. Since I love my little space on these interwebs, I won’t call it a spit-bucket, but really, it’s actually nice that it all feels like glue and string.

I’d like to think that the next one hundred posts will be different. They will be better written, more thoughtful (sagacious even) and will be valuable for all three of my readers. It’s possible. So.

Notes