The Kilopost

Osprey Marina
N 33 40.866 W 79 02.481

If I counted correctly, this post is the 1,000th article to be posted on Dick and Libby's Tarwathie Cruising Log. That makes this the kilopost. That's quite a milestone, so I thought that I would write a little about the blog itself.

What a wonderful media blogging is. It allows me to indulge in writing to my heart's content without having to deal with editors or publishers. It allows you to visit and sample the blog as much or as little as pleases you. It also reaches out to friends, relatives, acquaintances, and complete strangers alike. I have no idea how many people actually read the blog. I get hit counts and reports but that is of little use.

I get a kick out of it when I hear others give their opinions on blogging in newspapers or radio. Some love it, many hate it and think that it is a scourge on society. Neither view is correct. Blogging is just a new form of writing. Bloggers are able to do anything on the web that a writer can do with paper and ink. One can not say that one loves or hates all written things.

Sometimes it seems that I write far too much. Consider Raden Ngabahi Ranggawarsita who published the Javanese Book of Kings in 1869. The Book of Kings is said to be the world's longest book. Ranggawarsita was said to have written three pages per day, every day for thirty years, totaling six million words.

Let's compare my blog to the Book of Kings. I write less than three pages per day. In fact, I posted about 817,000 words in 1,000 posts so far. I don't expect to live another thirty years, but if I continue for another ten years, the blog will be only 3.5 million words long. [It will be a real challenge to do that without the prose becoming repetitive and boring. I have to delve deeper and deeper to keep things fresh and to not forget subjects that I've written about before.] By the way, Ranggawarsita was also said to have made up most of the things he wrote about. I don't. The things I write are true, taken from our everyday life. I have maybe embellished a few times, but not a single blog article here is made up.

Several people have written to tell me that after becoming acquainted to this blog, they got hooked and went back to read the entire archive. Wow! I can't believe they read the whole thing. One man said that he printed out the archive from 2/2005 through 6/2007 on the color printer at work and that it took 500 pages. Double wow! I hope his boss didn't learn what he was doing.

Several people ask if I'm not going to turn the blog archive into a book. Yes. I've always had that thought, although I never took any concrete steps towards doing so. One obstacle to doing that is the length. The blog might make an interesting book at 200 pages, but it would be a door stopper at 1,000 pages. Yet how could I edit it down? I understand that the appeal of the blog to many readers is the fact that it is a daily journal. I write almost every day, and I post immediately after finishing writing, even while at sea. (Yes, I know. Sometimes I need a copy editor to catch my errors -- too bad.) Only a handful of the posts were written on days different than the post date. It is even more rare that I go back and retroactively correct and error or alter a post. That is important because contemporary writing is inevitably different than ex post facto writing.

What is this blog about? Yes, it is a journal, but journals can be slanted in many different ways. The mental model I carry is that I write for readers who dream of being sailing cruisers themselves and who want to know what it is really like. Most of the posts are not advice on how to fix things, or how to provision or how to become a cruiser. Rather, they relate Libby and my lives contemporaneously as we live the dream. Living the Dream would be a perfect name for this blog or for a book, but unfortunately it has been used very many times before by others. I believe that writing contemporaneously is what helps to make this blog different than other blogs and other books. That is what makes this blog so voluminous and, I hope, so interesting.

I often write about the very friendly and interesting people we meet along the way. I don't ask their permission to use their stories. Therefore, with a few exceptions, I only use first names. I also discipline myself to not write things that might be offensive or embarrassing to those people. In a nutshell, if my subjects Google search their own names, they should not find this blog. But if they do, they should not be angered or embarrassed by anything they read here. I'm admitting a bias here. You'll have to take my word for it that the self censorship is rarely needed. The overwhelming majority of people we meet and our experiences with them are very positive.

I regret that I can't convince Libby to write blog articles more often. Readers have repeatedly asked for it. In reality, only a minority of people enjoy writing and are good at it. Obviously, I enjoy it. Also obviously, I keep in practice. I intend to continue as long as I can.