One Year of Blogging
I can’t believe I’ve been blogging for one year. I’m not just saying that. I’m typing it. It probably doesn’t feel like a year because I’ve barely posted anything in the last six months. Life, uh, has found a way… to get in the way. This was supposed to be the year I got back into writing, but I’ve done less of that than last year. This blog is the closest to consistent writing I’ve done, and it’s become a somewhat major part of my life. Now that it’s been a year, I want to take a moment to reflect on how it’s gone.
This blog started on October 28, 2025. I bought the one year subscription and made my first post on the same day. I wrote about my then addiction to Escape from New York (I have since overcome said issue).
Bear Blog was the obvious choice, because I wanted a platform that was free of AI tools, algorithms, and overly complicated layouts, options, and plugins. I used Wordpress extensively in my career, and I’ve always hated it. Wordpress makes even the simplest of tasks far too fiddly. I wanted something more lightweight, something that prioritized the quality of the text over images, videos, and SEO. I also hoped to find something more niche, something with a small but dedicated audience. I also wanted something that wasn’t based in the United States. Bear checked all my boxes.
My original goal was to use this website not only as a blog but also as an author’s website. I could post about the books I’d write, share short stories, and use it to show my work to land potential writing gigs. None of that’s panned out yet. I haven't even started writing a book, the few short stories I’ve written aren’t good enough to share, and I can’t find a writing gig if my life depended on it. Which, you know, it kinda does since that’s what jobs are in a capitalist society. I’ve removed the section containing my past work because it wasn’t doing any good. I don’t think anyone ever clicked on that page, and fair enough.
Even the blogging part of this blog hasn’t quite gone as I expected. This began as a free-form daily blog. I’d write three or four paragraphs about some random topic that popped into my head and post it only lightly edited. I did this for about three months before I realized that posting random, unedited crap went against the whole “using this website as a platform to land a writing job” thing. So I wrote less, deleted a lot of the old posts, and made a detailed plan for what my blogs would be from then on. Blogs that could not only help my career as a writer, but enrich the lives of those who read them.
That’s when I got to work on ‘Top 10 Anime Tiddies.’
I joke, but that was the kind of garbage I had to write back in the day. I viewed it as something I had to do to get my foot in the door. Writing ultra low quality listicles and gossip trash was not something I ever enjoyed. I gritted my teeth and bared with it because I thought it would lead to better things. In hindsight, it’s obvious that wasn’t going to happen. No award-winning journalist or writer ever got their start writing about TOP 15 ATHLETES WHO PUKED DURING GAMES or the TOP 12 DUMBEST LAWSUITS!!!. Looking up those articles to get the links really brought back some terrible memories.
I eventually managed to escape that life and embark on a real(ish) journalism career, but I wasn’t particularly satisfied with that, either. That interview I linked to is one of the rare highlights from that part of my career. Even during this time I was mostly stuck writing “news” stories about stuff that’d already been posted a hundred times, on stuff nobody cared about.
I wanted to write about what would interest me, and what I thought other people would want to read. That’s always been the guiding principle of this blog, though instead of dashing off whatever inane thing that popped into my head, I’d write about what really stuck with me. That led to blogs about why I quit YouTube, documenting all the game developers who use AI, and talking about the process of pitching short stories to magazines and dealing with rejection. This is some of the best writing I’ve ever done, and the most fun I’ve had while writing.
The downside, if you can even call it that, is that it takes longer to write these edited blogs than the stream-of-consciousness posts I was doing before. I’ve gone from blogging every day to once a week, then to once a month, and now to about once every two months. I have to plan what I’m going to write, outline it, research it, write a first draft, edit that and take notes, write a second draft, re-edit it, then write a third draft. Sometimes I’ll write a fourth draft if I’m not feeling it. A couple of blogs I scrapped without posting because they weren’t good enough; either too poorly written or they were plain boring. Woe is me.
I want to blog more though, damn the excuses. I made a schedule for the rest of 2026, and if I stick with it, I should publish eight more blogs before 2027 (not counting this one). It’s an ambitious schedule, considering I’ve only published 20 blogs so far this year (counting this one). That’s 20 blogs in the first ten months compared to eight in the last two. Somebody can do the math on that. I’ve already started work on seven of them, so I’m feeling confident I can pull this off. Famous last words.
If I can stop talking about myself for five seconds, I want to thank you all. Your feedback has been wonderful. This blog doesn't have comments, so I don’t get to hear from you often, but when I do, it always brings a smile. The biggest surprise so far was the reaction to my blog about almost becoming a vtuber. You folks really seemed to like that one, based on comments posted on Guestbooks. I even got a couple of emails about it, which is weird considering I never posted my email address here. I wrote that blog almost on a whim, because I looked up a couple of vtubers I used to watch way back when and remembered how I almost jumped on the craze.
Guestbooks might be my favorite thing about this blog. We all like to receive praise, but hearing from you all about your thoughts on things is a real delight, and I always love seeing a new message come through. I still haven’t looked at the analytics for this blog, and I’m not going to. Based on Guestbook posts, and occasionally looking at how many upvotes individual posts get, I’m happy with my traffic. Its important to remember you’re writing for people, not numbers.
I think that’s enough reminiscing for one day. Here’s to the next year of blogging, and I hope you’re looking forward to it. Whether you’ve been here from the start or this is your first, thank you so much. I don’t know if I’d bother writing these if I didn’t have somebody out there reading and enjoying/tolerating them. When I write about ‘TOP 10 BLOG READERS!’ I’ll be sure to put you in the top three. Top five, minimum.
Thing of the Whenever
October 2026 is also the 50th anniversary of CJ Cherryh’s second novel Brothers of Earth. Technically, it’s her first. She wrote and submitted it before Gate of Ivrel, but her publisher, Donald Wollheim, deemed that more commercially viable, so Gate released first. It seems he was right, as that book launched her career and is still considered a classic, while Brothers of Earth is more or less forgotten.
Brothers of Earth has all the hallmarks of her later work. An emphasis on philosophical and religious discussion rather than action, the exploration of intricate alien cultures, deep characters, and an archaic approach to dialog (I don’t know how else to describe it) that here works well. There are also severe pacing problems (especially in the first half), a protagonist who is too passive, and a weak romance subplot.
Kurt Morgan is a weak protagonist, and I struggled with the book at first, until I realized that he’s not the main character. He’s the protagonist because he’s human, and this allows other characters to tell him (and thus the audience) how this world works. The real main character is a ship captain named Kta, whom we only get to see from a distance. A more experienced writer would either give Kurt more to do, or have made Kta the protagonist and figured out how to more subtly inform the audience how this world and culture operate.
In that sense, Brothers of Earth feels like the prototype for Foreigner, because that’s exactly what Cherryh did with it. There, protagonist Bren Cameron is also largely passive, but the story still revolves around him. Bren also isn't constantly told how the world works, so Cherryh can subtly explain important mechanics through dialog and actions, without having to stop the narrative to lecture the audience on how the alien religion works, or how their society is structured, or what their food is like, as is the case in Brothers of Earth.
Still, I’d say it’s a good book. I was going to call it mediocre, but then I got to the last 60 or so pages and everything changed. The second half was already much better than the first half, but those last few pages were incredible, so much so that I’m not going to say what happens because it’s worth reading yourself.
Also, the plot twist that kicked off the exciting second half probably would have been more impactful if it wasn’t spoiled by the cover art, but that’s not Cherryh’s fault.
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