Ringing out 2021, and this Blog

This is post 4773. At one post per day this blog's 5000th and last post will go up on 15 August, 2022. Right?

We have been asked here and a few other places not to stop the blog and why would we stop the blog.

We are a writer. A good writer. A highly successful writer to boot. We are a better writer now than when we began this blog in April of 2015. A writer writes. If a writer isn't writing one thing, a writer should be writing another thing. If we're not working on one novel (75), we're working on another (The Weser). Or an Inforos piece. Or a 19Fortyfive piece. Or getting something up on Substack. Or this blog. Who are these writers that get 'writer's block'? If you're a writer who has writer's block, go get a day job. Writing is a our day job. 

We've never quite been able to vanquish the typos. Other bloggers do, you say? Bully for them.

As we've noted many times before, this blog was begun in 2015 to give us something to do during the afternoon dead time. We blog in the morning now. We had wanted to blog about teaching, among other things. Our professorial career blew up not long after starting the blog.  Which was no problem. We just told ourselves we'd write more. 

And so we have. This blog's traffic peaked in 2017 and has gradually and remorselessly shrunk since. We used to do lots of short posts, now we do one long post. We used to write a tonne about politics. Partly because we enjoyed doing so. Partly because we felt we had some expertise to lend. Hey, we called 2016 and 2 of the 3 things in the 2018 elections. And if you think Joe got 81 million votes, all we can say is Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself. 

We've gotten away from politics somewhat. We really don't feel like analyzing polls anymore. And we never wanted to be one of those blogs that merely hurls invective at the other side over and over again like the leftwing blogs of the mid-2000s. Anyone else remember My Leftwing or Daily Kos? Not that we haven't bashed Hillary! or whomever.

We spend an awful lot of time here talking about writing process. Is it really that interesting? And the self-deprecating humor must be  played at this point, no? It's been years since we did a Battle Extraordinaire post. We ran out of battles. 

Still we blog on. We like the feeling of churning something out by 9 AM or so. This sets us on a path for having a productive day. Also, blogging is something of a challenge. The internet is littered with blogs that end abruptly as the blogger realized writing (and blogging) is hard. You people try coming up with new stuff every day. Our late FBF Kathy Shaidle often talked about the challenge of blogging day in, day out. 2022 will be this blog's eight year. 

So here on the last day of 2021 when people ask us what we do, we say we're a writer. We write novels. We have a semi-weekly column for a Russian news service. We write  military history magazine articles. We have a stupid blog. It all sounds good. So why stop blogging?

See the second to last sentence. We used to write tonnes of military history magazine articles. By 2008 we'd get 10-15 published every year. See this blog's right sidebar, for instance. It was nice to say, 'Hey, we have a new article in print.' Sometimes we'd have articles in different magazines at the same time. Which was pretty cool. We liked going to Borders or B&N to see our work on the magazine rack. We'd buy three or four copies (those cheap bastards at Decision Games would send you one complimentary, if you asked) just so we'd have an excuse to tell the cashier we wrote the cover article. But by 2015 we'd been writing military history articles for over a decade and figured the gig had taken us about as far as it could. We worked on a history book instead, Pershing in Command. Because we are very good at what we do, we turned most chapters into a magazine article first. Again, see sidebar. 

Our point is, we stopped writing military history magazine articles. There's no reason we can't stop blogging too. Why stop, reader(s) may ask. Why keep going? We ask back. We'll plug on till 15 August, 2022 and end with, 'This is Stroock's Books 5,000th post). Not bad, eh Kathy?