Tomorrow is the last day of #blogjune. How quickly it has made June zip by. Over the month the challenge to post something everyday has really made me reflect on the way my blog has changed over the years. A couple of days ago I tried to remember when and why I started blogging in the first place.

I was a reader of a couple of excellent blogs way before I was brave enough to start my own.

During 2005 and 2006 while I was finishing my PhD I stumbled across a blog written by an English postgrad student and researcher. I used to read it every morning before I started writing. It was called Ten Seconds to Midnight and the author’s name was Esther ( I think). All I remember now was that she lived in Brighton and was into science fiction, fantasy and cosplay events. At the time I knew even less about all of those things than I do know (which still isn’t much) so it was all very interesting. I never got up the gumption to actually comment. And then one day I went looking for the blog and it had gone. (I just had another quick google and can find a reference to the blog on an old Brighton blog from 2003 but the link is not the same).

The blogger that really inspired me to start my own blog was @CirculatingLib and her blog Circulating Library. That may have been in 2008 (I’m hazy on dates). No doubt I was procrastinating somehow and managed to stumble across a post. After a fair amount of lurking I plucked up the courage to leave a comment on one of the posts and soon I was commenting on lots of things and learning a lot, particularly about Doctor Who. And I was inspired to jump in and start my own blog. For a number of years it was a Blogger/Blogspot blog. Then I took the plunge and asked the excellent @Rocketpilot to redesign my site and host it for me as well.

For the first few years of blogging I was fairly prolific. Each year would see close to 300 posts. Then along came Twitter and they competed for my attention for a while. Soon I found myself tweeting stuff that I normally would have written a longer post about. And for the last few years I have made it my goal to hit 100 posts by the end of the  year. This has been greatly helped by blogjune and my December Christmas Countdown.

I think this might be my third #blogjune. Looking back at last year I can see that many of my posts were hurried and fairly perfunctory. This year I have tried to make more of an effort to at least make it 500 words for most posts. My blog posts will never be must read, authoritative treatises on issues of the day. Even though I would like that to be the case, that’s just not how I roll. I’d rather write posts about little things, personal things, everyday stuff that might resonate with other people and then again it might not. So if you’re looking for highly informed writing about the big issues, then The Spiralling Shape might not be for you. That’s not what my blog is for (perhaps more on this in tomorrow’s post). If you don’t mind reading meandering posts about food, books, television, film, music and lessons learned in life, then make yourself at home and stay awhile.