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| The room in which The Mumpsimus was born. Photo from February 2007. |
Well, golly. Today marks eight years since I created this blog back in 2003. I didn't post anything beyond the definition of the word "mumpsimus" on that first day, but then things got going with a post about a story by James Patrick Kelly after a brief statement of purpose.
The statement of purpose ended by saying, "Who knows what will come of all this?"
What became of it was certainly more than I ever expected. The busiest time for the blog, in terms of posts and of visits from readers, were the first few years, particularly 2004 and 2005. There weren't a whole lot of other people doing what I was doing, and it felt like everybody who was writing blogs about books and literature of any sort knew and read each other (hence the creation of the Litblog Co-op). But the blogosphere expanded rapidly, and one day it seemed like there were 1,000 book blogs out there. And a lot of us stopped thinking of ourselves as fundamentally book bloggers, for various reasons. I still write a few reviews a year, but usually for places other than this blog, and though I've always written about film here (the 6th post on the site was about Brazil), I've grown more and more interested in writing about it as over the last few years I've been involved in making some movies and have started teaching film and media courses.
The blog wouldn't have survived if it couldn't change along with me, and it really has -- not just visually, as this Wayback Machine capture of the site in the fall of 2003 attests. It's always been a place where I've tested out ideas, basically presenting a first-draft face to the world, which wasn't scary until suddenly, when I got some links from well-trafficked sites in 2004, people were looking. A lot of those early posts seem embarrassingly awkward, naive, and wrongheaded now, but there are recent posts that are awkward, naive, and wrongheaded, too. That's the territory, the necessary risk for any endeavor like this.
