My 750th Post and an Update on Early Guest Bloggers

I was surprised to get a notice from WordPress.com recently congratulating me on my 9th anniversary on the site. I guess I did register with them back in 2010, though the first blog I kept was anonymous, and has since been taken off public view.

I started my current blog on WordPress.com in January 2012, so more than seven years ago. Although my blog moved from WordPress.com to this self-hosted site in February 2017, I will count it as seven years old.

My old blog banner from WordPress.com

That makes my blog an oldster, even without counting my earlier “toe in the water” blog. In 2016, it was reported that the average lifespan of a blog is 100 days. A survey on BlogTyrant in 2018 showed that only 21.8% of blogs were more than five years old.

And, now WordPress tells me that this post is my 750th post.

I am tremendously proud of publishing twice a week for almost the entire seven years, with only occasional breaks for holidays and vacations. It hasn’t been easy, though I like the discipline of posting deadlines and the regular sense of accomplishment that blogging provides. And I am honored that people choose to follow the blog and read my posts regularly.

Back in the earlier years of this blog, I published a few guest posts by writers I know, and I thought I would use my 750th post to let readers know what has happened with these authors’ careers during the seven years I’ve been blogging.

Beth Lyon Barnett, whose post “The ‘Nature’ of Kaleidoscopes,” ran on July 25, 2012, has now published three novels. You can find them all here. As an aside, Beth just turned 91, and she is hard at work on her fourth novel.

Pamela B. Eglinski, who wrote “Clio Is My Muse” on August 8, 2012, has now written several novels. She started by writing historical fiction and has recently moved into time travel. You can find her books here.

I interviewed Christi Corbett for a post on June 19, 2013, shortly after her first historical novel was published (like mine, about the Oregon Trail). Christi has now published four novels and has recently announced a movie contract on her novel, A Mountain Man’s Redemption. You can find her books here.

Check out these writers’ books, and remember to leave reviews on Amazon or Goodreads or other book sites for authors if you like their books. Writers thrive on readers’ feedback, and your reviews only have to be a sentence or two long to tell other readers what you liked about the book.

Thank you to all my readers!