A Late Mention of My Blog-o-Versary [Blaugust 17]

Four score and...just kidding, it's only been four years. In my excitement over Blaugust, the costume, and a lot of other life events, I seem to have missed a day that I used to celebrate with great gusto. That day? The anniversary of starting this blog, or my blog-o-versary. Back when my reader-base was smaller, it was a big event to be celebrated by many, with many...but these days, I seem to have forgotten all about that.

Let's take a short field trip. *Fires up the Magic Blog Bus (wouldn't that be cool!?)*

Four years ago, the grammarian I was would feel dwarfed by who I am today. When I started this site, however, I felt that I was at the top of my game, an expert journalisty-bloggery-cool-person who would immediately grab the attention of anyone even vaguely interested in my limited subject matter. Once I put my first post out, I sat back and waited for a waterfall of enamored comments to respond to selectively.

Today, the ringtone for my comments notification e-mails is a crowd cheering, and I hear it once a day if I'm lucky. Overrun by spam-slams, my pageviews bar is erratic at best and sea level at worst. (But I have a cool ringtone, so I've got that going for me.)

Since I started this site, I've had many major changes in focus and style. I went from something described as public diary-writing to something more like fiction-writing. I stuck with that for a few years until I realized that I was doing it more for the audience than myself, so I went through about half a year of meandering past good post topics and solid skills, just trying to find out who I was. Coincidentally, this was also a time when the MMO I wrote about wasn't producing any new content that was within my topic comfort-zone (and, oh, it still hasn't). I started playing more Steam games, convincing myself my reader-base wouldn't like me writing about them, so I had no reason to.

And then Christmas time came. I was talking with a good friend of mine via Twitter DMs late into the early morning, talking about how much fun I was having with Dear Esther and Bastion, and how I wanted to write about them. I kept my initial worries to myself, but came to the decision at about two in the morning in southern Florida that it was really time to make a change. In early January, I talked with that same friend again, and he was the first one to hear about the changes I was going to make to the site.

The changes didn't stay under the hood for very long, though. In late January, I announced my two-week downtime for design and domain changes while I got things set up again (most of which happened in the, uh, last day of downtime). I was nervous to be writing to a different audience, one I didn't even know yet, and under my real first name. The era of Destiny Soultamer, Dead-eye Destiny Devereaux, and (their hybrid) D.S. Dev'x was over, and I was going to be starting something that I had no idea would get much, much bigger.

And now I'm here. This has been much more emotional of a post than I had really expected...wow. I have to thank everyone from my 2011-2014 readerbase that's stuck around with me while I changed my writing into something that both I and my audience likes, changed my subjects into something more manageable for me, and overall got a very different experience. And to my new friends, I must thank you all for welcoming, supporting, and inspiring me as I get adjusted. I felt like I fit in really early on, and it was thanks to all of you that I have been able to grow.

And there are some individuals who deserve thanks outright. You know who you are.