The End...For Now

This is the 286th post on Along Presently. It's also, at least for now, the last.

I started a daily blog having been inspired by the likes of Richard Herring (who has now done his daily blog for over 8 years) to use it as a way of keeping my writing sharp and to be able to say that, if nothing else, I had at least written something every day. In the beginning it was fairly easy to keep up - allowing a 20 minute-or-so period in the morning to get down the previous day's events - but as soon as one day slips, that easily becomes two and three and all too often I've found myself anxiously putting aside evenings and even whole days to catch up on whole weeks at a time. This, clearly, is a pretty poor show for a "daily" blog.

Instead Along Presently stands as a record of 285 consecutive days of my life - and in that sense it's been successful, and something I can look back on proudly. The fact that I now feel unable to carry on with it is a shame (as is the fact that 285 is a maddeningly odd number of days), but it has certainly achieved its goal of getting me writing again, getting me thinking about writing and starting new projects. The main reason it has become a drag, in fact, is that it's effectively stopping me from writing anything else. I've tried and failed to properly start a new blog since I started Along Presently, and left a previously successful one to rot rather - mainly because every time I feel I have "time to write" it's spent catching up with this, rather than doing anything possibly more interesting or "useful", in a career sense.

So I'm stopping Along Presently (at least for a while) - but I'm not stopping writing. I'm going to write more about the things that interest me (football, technology, University Challenge) rather than focussing purely on the mundane details of my life. I will, however, post links on here to everything I write and every other misguided project I decide to launch. I may even develop the Along Presently idea into something else.

So that's it. Many thanks to the handful of people who have bothered to read this over the last nine months - but I'm off to do something else for a while.

Mat x