So this month marks the one year birthday of DemiOrator, this disreputable weblog of mine. On July 27, 2004 at 10:53pm East coast time, I posted my initial bit of brilliance. The post was not auspicious or scintillating. I did not have the faintest idea what I was doing or where it would lead. This blog was an impulse born of the political heat of the moment. The Dems were having their convention and I wanted to express something inchoate within me. I had a Live Journal but that was not really doing it for me. (I still have the LJ.)

I look over those initial posts and see how stilted my writing was with disuse. My writing had been in remission for many years with the occasional spastic burst of an article for newsletters and zines. Then there was adapting my writing to the form of blogging. Oh, sure, you can do all sorts of things in a blog but I had to discover my personal style for blogging. How formal or informal did I want to be? How personal did I want to be? I didn't really do a lot of thinking about it; I just blogged and let it develop in an organic fashion.

I still rarely plan ahead for this blog. The closest thing to regular pieces are the posts I do almost every week for the Progressive Blogger Union. Those vary from being drudgery to being great research projects. My major complaint about my blogging is what I consider my continued narcissism and a dearth of participation or involvement in other blogs. Perhaps I'm more focused on developing my writing after such a long drought. I'm also not particularly glib when it comes to commenting. I think too much about what I write. It doesn't necessarily make me a better writer but it does make me a cautious one. Sometimes I end up spending 20 or 30 minutes to get out what eventually ends up appearing like an offhand comment. I'm a slow thinker. I don't like to say stupid things. Sometimes I'll spend time writing a comment in another blog only to erase it and not post it. Perhaps I'm too cautious for my own good.

I have no grand designs for DemiOrator. I think it's turned into a pretty typical personal/political blog, uneven of tone and subject with flashes of wit and insight every once in a while. It's still fun for me and is getting more fun as time goes on. There are many other subjects of interest to me that I could write about in this blog but I think limits actually help focus my writing.

I could get really narcissistic and dissect some of the early posts on this blog. That might be ugly or funny, depending. Nah, I think I'll just keep going ahead. Don't look back?

[Update: Not really an update but something I forgot to mention. One of the things I really love about writing this blog is that I'm able to indulge my stylistic quirks and odd vocabulary. Most of the time when I'm writing prose for public consumption, I'm aware of avoiding unusual words in an attempt to write to a broader audience. I have no desire to write impenetrable sentences or use a flood of arcane words but I like having the freedom to use what I consider apt or appropriate words. My writing style here is probably the closest I've ever gotten to a "natural" voice, a voice more representative of my quaint and archaic thought process. I also like slyly slipping in obsolete meanings and usages of words. It's a delicious game for me and an essential part of my expressive matrix. I'm such a rogue!]

[Update2: I wasn't consciously aware of it at the time I wrote the first update but the word "quaint" has also been used as a substitute for another word. What word? Hints: It's a four letter word and popularly considered obscene. Its origin goes back to 1100CE at least. If you can't figure it out, ask me in the comments.]