My blog is officially one year old
Good morning, afternoon, or whenever it is that you read this.
Cat's Musings is, as of today, officially one year old. I mentioned in my 100th post, this has been my consistent and most successful blog. Technically, my first post was October 26th, but I consider Wide Open Spaces to be the true beginning of the blog.
How do I measure the success of my blog? I measure it in satisfaction with my work. I'm taking a closer eye on my wordsmithing than I have in a long time. I feel I have improved in my craft over the year - and that the blog is largely to credit with that.
I enjoy having a place to drop my thoughts. I know I could just journal, but I like thinking in the public space as it forces me to be honest to some degree.
I thought I'd share a few fun insights from this year:
Some funny numbers
I have written 109 posts with the inclusion of this one. That's an average of around 2 posts per a week. And my average amount of posts per a month is slightly over 8, so it works out there too. But, there's a few interesting outliers - namely the month of November, and the month of January which carry with them 15 and 13 posts respectively. November was tracking my progress with WritingMonth2026 and I was just uncharacteristically prolific in January.
Removing those two outliers, my average is around 7.4. It still isn't bad, coming out to a more realistic cadence of about 1.85 posts per a week.
My slowest months for blogging were June and July. Late June is where you begin to realize school will be starting soon, and July is when the mourning begins. I wrote 6 posts each during these two months. My other slow months (April and May with 7 each) was when work was getting very difficult. I can see my aggression coming out during those months.
I was weirdly active in August, but I think I was partly psyching myself up for the school year.
Genre analysis
Reading
Quite a bit a few of my posts come from logging my reading. I have 16 posts which covers a majority of the reading I've done since the blog started. There's two I haven't reviewed because they were fairly short - What Moves The Dead and Jesus and the Disinherited. I also didn't write a review of Cruelty Is The Point because I was trying to keep my blog light as I approached the beginning of the school year.
My favorite of my reviews is How The Word Is Passed. The central thesis of the book is so relevant to the world I grew up in, and I think I communicated my passion well.
Nature and Adventure
There's a huge amount of overlap between these two tags, but I counted 20 posts that fit into this category. No surprise, my inspiration to start this blog was a night camping in a pasture.
Picking a favorite here is really difficult because I am constantly enamored by nature, and these posts help me remember them clearly again. Push comes to shove, I think I would pick A Spiritual Awakening in Big Bend. It was a recounting of the moment my syncretic pseudo-pagan beliefs began to form, and the awe I've been seeking ever since.
Self Analysis and Nostalgia
One of my favorite activities on my blog is to engage in meta cognition. I like to think about my life and its events, consider my psyche at time, and attempt to draw some kind of meaning from them. Fun fact, originally Journaling and StoryTime were under a single tag called 'Rambling', which was also my second ever tag (the first one was simply blogging). It no longer exists on the blog because I split it between Journaling and StoryTime.
A favorite post here is also difficult to pick for the same reasons I like nature. This is probably biased because I am typing this October 27th, but I went ghost hunting might be the one. It was one where I finished it, checked it over, thought 'this is a nice one', and posted.
Politics
I've always been interested in the systems of government (I do have an MA in political science and wanted to be political commentator when I was younger), so it's no surprise I have quite a few posts dedicated to it, such as NewsThoughts, Politics, Geography, and most of Education. I try to bring in my expertise and knowledge to contextualize news events, and I love writing explainers. (Explainers are consistently the substitute assignment for when I need to be out).
My favorite here is easily Who's Gerry Mandering?, which combines three things I'm passionate about: politics, geography, and teaching.
Hobbies
I'm excluding hiking and walking as hobbies here because they can be found in nature and adventure, and reading because it has its whole own genre. In this case, I am talking about VideoGames and ttrpgs. These are personally some of my least favorites. It's a containment center for me to gush about my current hyper-fixation.
Of these, I think Using Tarot for Character Creation is probably my favorite from this group because it's an exercise in creativity.
I can't shut the hell up
My writing on this blog is much like how I speak - I meander, I go on tangents, and suddenly a short story has taken up minutes. For example, my recent Photo dump from my october camp post ended up being well over 1500 words. I had honestly been hoping for around 800.
But I really like that post regardless. I like writing and reading longer content. I try to tighten up a little bit in my second pass over, but I also don't want to lose my voice. I'm a social studies teacher and a storyteller - my voice lives in those moments. So, I plan to just let the long posts ride.
I'm looking forward to an even better year two.
Thanks for reading.