Thursday, December 30, 2021

The last blog post of 2021?

 Boy, this pandemic is killing my blogging output. How can a virus weaken one's blogging without the writer getting the disease, you ask?

Well, first came the lockdown, those months when we were all suddenly at home doing jigsaw puzzles and watching Tiger King. (Okay, so maybe you resisted that. I didn't.) I started digging through old files and decided to write a book. By the time The Rise and Fall of an Eighties Sherlockian came out earlier this year, I had pretty much decreased my 2020 blog posts to almost half the number of the year before.

And then, even as that project finished and 2021 began, what happened? I kicked off The Sherlockian Chronologist Guild and its monthly newsletter, Timelines. A fairly niche topic right? Shouldn't take up all that much mental space, right?

Twelve monthly issues later, with a grand total of twenty-six subscribers, I have learned otherwise. There are more rabbit holes to Sherlockian chronology than most ever suspect, and as tiny as twenty-six subscribers might seem for any normal area of interest, I was dead sure the entire Sherlockian world was going to have no more than eight interested parties. You don't do Sherlockian chronology for popularity, that's for darned sure.

But what did that chronology occupation do? Drop my blog post count from 2020's all-time low by another twenty percent! 

And as 2021 starts, I find myself occupied by January 14's Pub Night at the Dangling Prussian, which has gotten my few blog posts of late. Throw in some other hot topics that I am trying to keep my mouth shut on for various reasons, and my output for the month of December has hit an all time low of TWO posts so far. While always a busy, distracting month, December of 2018 had twenty-nine posts as I was reading fics and going to see Holmes and Watson multiple times while its short run in theaters held up.

Ah, happier times.

But the pandemic hasn't killed this blogger* (*yet!) so we shall hope that 2022 brings more things to write about that aren't sidelined off to the chronology corner or some tome on the eighties.

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