2015 is finally here! Good riddance to 2014, and a nice welcome to the new year of 2015!
I was not overly happy with 2014, and it is not a year that I will personally remember with much fondness. There were just many surprises, and most of them were admittedly unwelcome.
Still, we survived to see another year.
One of the areas where I felt 2014 was a pretty decent year was with my writing. I applied to a few jobs in September, and got an answer back from one publication, the Guardian Liberty Voice.
Within a few weeks, I was taking their two-week training course for writer's, which culminated in what they called "Hell Day." This was a vigorous day that required prospective writers to commit an entire day to writing online articles, using their protocol. Sox articles in all, start to finish, within a 24-hour period, with no mistakes allowed!
It was exhausting. Draining. Nerve wracking.
Yet, in the end, I managed to pass, and it was probably the biggest professional accomplishment in writing in my life to date. There are goals that I would like to achieve someday, but that was an actual accomplishment that felt good. Given the difficulties in so many other areas in my life last year (boy, it's good to be able to refer to 2014 in the past tense, finally, since it felt cursed!), and that these were particularly relentless right around the time that I was going through the training, I felt proud, and still feel that this was justified.
Financial problems became the norm throughout 2014, and at that time, it seemed like my ex-wife and our son were about to be evicted from the apartment complex. I had to step in financially, and it was absolutely draining. At the time, I had just about begun to recover and get back on my feet from some trips taken over the summer, when it felt like the rug was swept out from under me.
Those financial problems added to, or in some cases were a major sources of, other problems in my life. Another one that was suddenly a major threat, and potentially draining distraction, were the relationship problems with my girlfriend, who understandably was tired of hearing about the problems with the ex. We are still together, but it sure looked like it was not going to last in October.
October was the month that I went through the training, and it was around that time that I realized, fully, that there would likely be no strong financial recovery within the calendar year of 2014. The commitment that it took to go through the classes in writing prevented me from working days at my part-time job, and it seemed for a while that I had essentially lost that job. That would have meant going from never having lost a job under my own terms, to losing two in the same calendar year and this, of course, added to my depression and sense of misery.
So, coming out of that class managing to do something that most who attended the class did not manage to do was, for me, a big thing. It felt good, and I was committed to making it work. I actually still feel good about it.
Then, of course, there is this. The Charbor Chronicles. I have been active here on this since late in 2010, but each year grew progressively more active. There were 3 blog entries in 2010, although really, there should have been more, late start or not. In 2011, there were only 24, which given that it was a full calendar year, was a shamefully slow and inactive year. But in 2012, that number rose dramatically to 356, just under one blog entry per day. In 2013, I almost doubled that, with 709 blog entries published.
But in 2014, I had a record year posting blog entries, actually eventually publishing more blog entries in that year alone than all of the previous years combined!
That, too, felt like a major accomplishment, albeit in a very different manner than what I did with Guardian Liberty Voice. But an accomplishment nonetheless, and that, after being forced to scale down my writing for those two or so weeks that I was going through the training. Plus, there were those vacations over the summer, when I had very limited access to the internet, and was not able to really publish anything on The Charbor Chronicles.
Plus, I made some real progress in both writing and editing with my personal writings, particularly the fiction works.
So, given all of that, I feel that I have a good reason to feel particularly proud of the year in writing in 2014, which was otherwise a pretty bleak year for me.
That said, I wanted to say right away that this year, I intend to scale down the blog entries a bit from last year. Part of the reason why I had so many last year was because every day, I tried to publish a couple of entries, including the On This Day in History series, which was not unique to me. But I will not be doing those this year. Maybe they will return some time in the future, but I will make these more fully my own if that does happen. The thing is, it takes a tremendous amount of work to do each one, and to do that every day might just be too grueling.
As the numbers grew last year, my desire to add more and more, to see the final tally be something that kind of took my breath away, grew as well. And I was rather taken by the increased numbers of page views, as well! It feels like just yesterday that I was thrilled with 30,000 views. It felt wonderful to reach 50,000!
But the numbers went up in a hurry! Suddenly, while I was on the trip to the South, it reached 100,000!
As I write this, there have been over 146,000 views, and growing!
There was one particular blog entry that I take pride in especially, which was published early in 2014 (January 23rd, to be precise). It is not the blog entry with the most views, or the most comments. Indeed, it is a movie review, but the movie is not a huge blockbuster, or anything like that. Yet, it is a movie that I wanted to see for a long time, since I first heard about it coming out. It never seemed to be showing around me, and then, one day, I saw it for sell on Ebay, and decided to go ahead. I watched it, then wrote the review for it. The movie was Orania, an award winning movie about a small town in South Africa where the residents et up an Afrikaners only town, which some believe translates to apartheid living on in a tiny enclave in the heart of South Africa. I actually promoted it on Facebook by going on the movie's page, and advertising there. The director, Tobias Lindner, apparently saw one of these, and clicked on the link to check out the article for himself, and promoted it! That was a huge victory for me! Please check it out for yourself by clicking on the link below:
http://charbor74.blogspot.com/2014/01/movie-review-orania-by-tobias-lindner.html
Since this is my personal blog page, and I cannot keep up with the big boys in the news or bigger media, and also since I have done virtually no advertising or promotion, other than occasionally adding a link to a blog entry that I took particular pride in, it felt great to see the numbers of viewers, or page views, rise like that!
Yet, still, my focus this year will be more on the quality of blog entries, and less on the quantity. There are ideas that I am playing around with, and this gives me a platform that other venues, such as the Guardian Liberty Voice, or the other writing projects, cannot present. So, I do intend to take advantage.
Just not as many blog entries this year as last year.
Here are some pictures that I took yesterday, the final day of 2014, that show the distribution by top ten countries with most views in the first picture, the page views by country at one particular moment in the second picture, and each has maps as illustration.
Thanks again for being a part of this!
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