It has taken 6 years and almost 7 months to accumulate 2000 posts on The 3 R’s Blog, but it happened yesterday. Post number 2001 seems like a good place to pause and consider how I got here, and where to go now that I am here. The last time I reviewed blog stats was the end of 2011 (I only looked at reading stats in 2012). I think this is a good occasion to revisit them, with a little bit of context from each year of the blog’s life. Care to come along?

The post count for this year includes two weeks of guest posts while my family went on vacation–and if I’d known I would dislocate my shoulder the day we got home, I would have arranged for more of them! I injured it again five months later, which derailed my NaBloPoMo November plans. All in all, I spent about ten weeks that year with my right arm in a sling, and produced nearly three dozen blog posts left-handed (which I am not). None were for the LA Moms Blog, however, as it shut down that summer. 


Recovery time was productive reading time, though; I read 54 books in 2010, none of which were audiobooks. (I can’t approach that number without audiobooks now!) I was part of a small group of book bloggers who founded Armchair BEA that spring, and I recovered from the first shoulder injury just in time to attend my first San Diego Comic Con and second BlogHer conference.

2011’s post count includes guest posts during the two weeks following surgery to fix the shoulder damage resulting from two dislocations in less than six months, and it was clearly my slowest blogging year to date. Because it was easier to share links on Twitter and Facebook as I came across them than hold and hoard them for the blog, I dropped my roundup posts. Between that and the shutdown of two weekly meme groups, the Weekend Assignment and Weekly Geeks, I was down to posting just 3-4 times per week, which has remained the norm around here.

I came away from the CreativeAlliance’12 retreat in the fall of 2012 with a desire to seek more opportunities to develop as a writer, including finding ways to get paid for doing it. I still have the desire, but–ad-network changes aside–I’ve probably moved further from acting on it. This year, I’ve become a realist (and not just because we bought a house, and there are bills to be paid!). Blogging is a hobby I love, and one that’s made me a better reader and writer, but I don’t have time or resources to make it into more at this stage of my life. I miss doing timely, current-events-driven posts, but it’s hard to fit them into the blogging schedule I’m managing now, so they continue to be infrequent–and when I do write them, I’m trying to tie them in with books. I’d like to explore more personal-essay writing as well–and tie it in with books.