Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

We’re off to the Eco Camp today, which means that there will be no post tomorrow, and if I’m lucky, on Monday either (the Integrated School participants have Monday next week excused as well). The camp is chockfull of activities until Sunday, after all, and I may need an extra day to recover from the weekend. So this might be the last entry for the month.

In other news, this online personal chronicle turns two years old today.

This, I believe, is a huge accomplishment for someone who used to have months (and even years) of lapse between scribbling in my paper memoirs started in the mid eighties.

That’s because back then, I couldn’t reconcile “writing about life” and “life getting in the way of writing”. Or find the balance. It always seemed that before I started putting this up for potentially millions of people to potentially access, I was doing more of one, sometimes to the exclusion of the other.

Usually I’d get the urge to write in my notebooks about something important that happened, and the habit would continue for several days or weeks of letting the blank pages be my confidante, until I get so involved in off-sheet activities that the scribbles become neglected again. Then some time later a big event would be too much for me to keep inside again, and the vicious cycle restarts.

Well, only the dormant phase is vicious, really.

Yes, for today, just like 365 days ago (and the time when I first announced this site to my creative writing group), I will wax nostalgic self-consciously about what I do here routinely during the rest of the year.

So, besides finally maintaining the discipline of typing several paragraphs regularly under my belt, without having to compromise giving up activities away from the keyboard, what else have I learned since I started and from the time I last enumerated some of the lessons this same date in 2004?

Can I look back and see from the way I write how I have changed as a person: what good qualities I have instilled, or maintain or improved, what neutral traits I have picked up or just set aside, and what negative habits I have removed and what I ought to conscientiously work against?

For one thing I have certainly steered away from the vagueness of some early posts. The amount of specification and description goes a long way towards helping to cement and further solidify the quality of lessons that I eventually have to repeat every four months or so.

I would also like to think that there is also a passion (quantified by volume) that shows in the later entries (sometimes enjoyment, otherwise – hopefully healthy - criticisms that eventually point to self, but not leading to debilitation), arising from an increased familiarity with the way that I have been expressing myself virtually.

Does this mean continuous “chipping” is one way of getting rid of recurrences of writer’s block?

Thus that fulfills the “writer” appellation of the title for yet another 52 weeks.