We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Program to Announce that Michael Jarmer Has Posted to the Blog Site 1000 Times Since 2011.

1000 blog entries ago, on February 11, 2011, I wrote the following under the title “Inaugural Blog.”

Here it goes, for better or worse. The impulse strikes and I’ve set up a blog. Whatever for? I’m a writer, first of all, and I suspect that I might have a few things to say about stuff for which I have interest and experience: teaching, writing, reading, playing music, listening to music, and being a dad. That’s a wide range of stuff, I know, and I suspect that a successful blog may need a tighter focus. What can I say? I see this as an experiment, a flirtation, a trial run, and not as a commitment. There’s something appealing to me about this idea, that’s all. I hope it might be instructive or entertaining for others. Who knows? At any rate, welcome to Michael Jarmer’s inaugural blog.

Well, almost fifteen years later, to the very day, here I am, still plugging away at the blog, having written, over the course of those years, one thousand blog entries, god only knows how many words. My impulse, it turns out, was correct. I wrote like a fiend about all of those topics I thought I would tackle. That experiment, or flirtation, would ultimately yield material enough for several unpublished books of poetry, an unpublished book of micro-essays about teaching, inspiration and gumption to publish my first novel, and a whole slew of writings about music. And while the one thing I have not published here on the blog site, that is, any fiction writing, I know that the practice of writing regularly on the blog has limbered me up for the fiction writing I continue to do. I have completed since 2011 a novella called Submarine Stories (available for preorder now), and in various shades of unfinished, three other long-form works of fiction. The habit of the blog, coupled with the ritual every April of writing a poem every day for a month, and since retirement, the corresponding fiction writing marathon in November, I have been most productive. It feels good. Also–I feel some nagging impulse to archive the site somehow, lest it be, in some cataclysmic breakdown of the internet, lost altogether and forever. I think I need a secretary. Hey, that’s a thing, isn’t it? At any rate, I have learned, or rather, have manifested in practice, that if there’s a thing you want to be doing, you just have to begin. Do the thing you want to do and keep doing it. Amen. I will probably be here for at least another one thousand entries.