The Year in Blogging

Only 98 posts in 2022, broken down as follows.

Month Posts
Jan 11
Feb 11
Mar 7
Apr 5
May 2
Jun 5
Jul 4
Aug 6
Sep 11
Oct 7
Nov 11
Dec 18

I’m shocked that I posted less than 100 times, but there you go. I’ve been busy with other things.

Other Things

Writing a Novel

What time I had for writing outside of work, I tried to spend mainly on completing my novel. You’ll recall that I did a Creative Writing MA in 2020–21. I graduated in May 2022. My dissertation was essentially the first 15,000 words of a novel (along with a preface on how it had all come together). I promised myself that I’d finish it by the end of the year. I haven’t quite achieved that goal, but I expect to in the next couple of weeks.

New Job

But to that ‘outside of work’, above: I started a new job in February. I never quite got round to writing about it here, except on my /now page, which is an infrequently-maintained page that’s meant to say what I’m up to at any time. I was and am glad to have it, of course, but it’s amazing how much working 9–5:30 again takes away from your ability to do other things.

The job itself? I was employed as a Java Developer — that’s literally in my job title — and I have written precisely zero lines of Java.

Instead, I found myself plunged into the exciting new world of infrastructure as code, or IaC, and the Terraform language. I might write more about that at some point, but in short, it seems I work in DevOps now, and I’m enjoying it.

Digression: On Writing at Work

I’ve written over 70,000 words of a novel over the past year-and-a-half or so. But since February I’ve written something like 100,000 words at work. This comes from keeping copious notes on what I’ve being doing and what I’ve learned, and so on. I thank Obsidian for making it easy to do so, and for working in a way that matches how I want to work. But I wonder: why didn’t I keep notes like this before? I always wrote things down, of course, but not this systematically, this comprehensively.

It’s a mystery.

Jury Duty

In May I spent three weeks on a Jury at Wood Green Crown Court. That was an interesting experience. I might write more about it one day.

Etc

And all the other things that make up life. Hey, I even read 33 books last year!