The Big Five Zero Zero Zero

5,000 posts.  Five. Thousand. Five, zero, zero, zero.

5,000.

We've been thinking about post 5,000 all year and here it is. 

Here's the very first post, written that way intentionally. 

Our late friend Kathy Shaidle liked to point out that one could start a blog but it's hard as hell to keep a blog going. We've been going for more than seven years now. We write this blog because we're a writer, an author, even a reporter sometimes. Writers write. One of the reasons we keep blogging is we like to think we have three things to write everyday: novels, articles, and this blog. 

We began this blog in April of 2015 to give us something to do in the afternoon and to write about teaching. Our professorial career would blowup just a few months later. But we kept blogging. 

In all that time we've written about writing, history, teaching, politics, culture, current events, heavy metal, depression and anti-depressants, and local events. We've written the blog that we would have wanted to read.

We've written one long post per day about one thing. We've written three or four short posts per day each about a different thing. Now we write one long post per day about several things. This is the format we've settled on. 

In seven years this blog has had several recurring themes. Some of them remain. We still do Monday Metal, the Friday flag, Will's Good Idea and Saturday updates. But long ago we dropped the Tuesday Tally and Battle Extraordinaire. The Thursday Musical Intervention was just too difficult. After nearly 20 years, we're still a terrible guitar player.

Over the years we've kept this blog zany, off color and a little weird. Stupid, even. That's on purpose.

Our imaginary Liverpudlian editor who won't stop calling us 'knobhead' is based on a real person, who edited several of our novels. We once fired our imaginary Liverpudlian editor over 'me too' concerns. We later rehired her. Heh. The real Ed stops by here occasionally 'to see you talking to yourself,' as she puts it. 'It's a train wreck', she once told me. Good.

We refer to 'we' and 'us' so as not to refer to 'I' and 'me'. People who write about 'I' and 'me' can't stop writing 'I' and 'me'. What are we? An overeducated urban white woman with a wine problem? We got that idea from the great James Taranto.  

This blog's traffic peaked in 2016-2017 and has steadily fallen off since. We've no idea why.  In all we probably have a couple of hundred dedicated fans. Also, readers of our work go here to look at maps for the World War 1990 series, but that's never resulted in increased traffic.  We've wondered on and off over the years if we should just knock off blogging and find something better to do. We've looked into other platforms and decided against moving. We've thought maybe we should just spend our time on Twitter, which is a horrible idea. 

This blog has been scanned, inspected, and downloaded (we think) by someone looking for examples of plagiarism and someone else looking for examples of Russian misinformation. We've never plagiarized anything anywhere in our life and everything we write is 99 and 44/100ths percent true. Perhaps half a dozen times we've written a post and decided not to publish. We have never deleted a published post.

After all those machinations about quitting, complaints about declining readership, and a vague but persistent sense that we could be doing something more useful, we'll just keep blogging. We kinda dig it.