About 7 years ago, May 25, 2011, I published my very
first blog-post. It was titled: NO EXPLANATION NEEDED, BUT HERE IT IS ANYWAYS, a bit disorganized, a shaky start, but anyways… And I was off and running.
I have always liked writing, getting thoughts on
paper, construct sentences that made sense, or not. I look for funny and silly
things, subjects, objects and playing with words. Collecting things to write
about comes from what’s around us and what we have the pleasure observing on a
daily basis and there is actually a lot of that stuff - constantly.
My initial reason for starting the blog was to
communicate with a few friends here in the USA, our friends and family in
Denmark and Sweden (where my wife and I are from originally). Being silly and
optimistic in the beginning, I wrote and published posts weekly (oh, I was so
young). It later changed to every other week, every month and ended with: ‘do I
have to?’
I seriously believed that in the beginning I would
get around 10-15 page-views (readers) per week, from three countries. I also
thought that those numbers were very optimistic. As of May 25, 2018, 7 years
later, the numbers were a bit different. The blog has been visited about 65,000
times, representing over 122 different countries; some I (embarrassingly) did
not even know existed.
I have published new posts about 173 times, including
all kinds of subjects. The most visited post by far is: SPEEDOS & THONGS – not a lot of cover up. One of my personal
favorites is: ABBREVIATIONS – the long version. But there are actually many more that I do like. You see, back in
the days I would rarely read what I had written (before the blog-thing). I
always found too many ‘negative’ things, bad sentences, paragraphs, subject
matters mishandled, etc. But as I tried my utmost with the posts the last 7
years, I found that to me, they are all very readable. Sure it sounds
big-headed, but so what, huh?
When I retired some years back, I wanted to write a
blog, which I did – duh! I wanted to write and publish a book, which I did –
twice. And I wanted to learn how to (really) play a musical keyboard; okay, so
I’m still working on that.
But now I’m moving on without the blog-writing and I
am already fine with that. Though things around me constantly inspire comments,
what really has inspired me the most these last 7 years of blog-writing are the
many readers and the many responses and comments from a lot of you. I sharpened
my pencils (metaphorically speaking, of course) again and again, as I worked
hard not to disappoint myself and especially the readers, of course, even more
so. Your interest has been mind-boggling and the page-views, quantity of readers
from so many countries, will forever and perhaps even longer, be a mystery to
me, but so appreciated.
And now what? I am working on two books, one where I
really like the main character and like where the story is going. I don’t think I’ll
ever publish it, but it’s interesting writing for me. The other book is my
(massive and not always successful) attempt to write a ‘humorous’ novel. That
is the most frustrating and horrible thing I have ever tried to write. I find
that writing ‘fun stuff’, as I want it to be consistently ‘funny’, is not an
easy task. I am of course also very critical of that kind of writing, which is
not a big help (sigh)…
So again, thank you so much for reading and following
my blog LIFE AS IT REALLY IS. It has
been a huge pleasure for me to write for that blog the last 7 years.
Remember
that the blog will continue to be up and running and you can always come back, go through
the INDEX and find something that
might amuse you for a few minutes. At times, that is all we need, a few smiles
and several giggles; and that was precisely what I aimed at, some 7 years ago.
Take care and keep reading – anything…
Peter B. Steiness (now former BlogHead)
