#oneaday Day 1: First Steps

Good morning! I'm going to make a proper go of this; looking back over my old blog, I used to really enjoy daily blogging, so I'm going to try and do this as regularly as possible.

I also left a message over there for former followers to migrate here if they're interested… it remains to see if anyone will pay up to help me out in exchange for reading my ramblings, however!

For those who are primarily here for other rewards, all these daily posts will be tagged with "blog" and "oneaday" so you can easily see them; likewise, the monthly $5+ wallpaper rewards are tagged with "wallpaper" so you can quickly and easily access all of them. Here's a handy link to access just the "wallpaper" posts.

So, what to talk about today? Well, I may as well talk a bit about why this is a thing and why I enjoy it, since some of you reading this won't have been around for my original #oneaday project.

The original #oneaday project started in January of 2010. I forget exactly who started the whole thing in the first place, but I became aware of it via Lauren "atheistium" Wainwright on Twitter. Lauren was working in the games journalism business at the time, and was someone whose work I enjoyed. She explained it as a means of getting people to think creatively and flex their writing muscles by writing something — anything — each and every day for a whole year. Even if you didn't think you had anything to write about. The whole point was to get you thinking about the process of writing and expressing yourself. It sounded like fun, so I joined in a little late on January 19, 2010.

A lot of people who were initially involved — including the creator of the tag, as I recall — barely lasted out of the first month, but a small but dedicated crowd of us pushed on, with various people dropping out over the course of the year. A handful of us managed the whole year, and in 2011 I decided to take the lead in another attempt, spawning what I called The One A Day Project.

This was a group effort where I invited people to sponsor us (for charity) in a year of blogging; I relaxed the "rules" somewhat to encourage more people to participate and this made some of the original participants who had dropped out within a few weeks very angry indeed — including, I recall, Matt "Jam_Sponge" Lees, who I thought was a massive wanker for his response at the time and, it turns out, really is a massive wanker — but this was a new year and a new beginning. Besides, if those original participants wanted input, they should have bloody lasted the whole year and played an active part in the community, shouldn't they?

We didn't make a huge amount of money in the process, but we did raise about £175 for Cancer Research UK in the process, so that was better than nothing; far more valuable to me personally was the sense of community the whole experience provided. Everyone involved seems to have gone their separate ways now, which is a bit sad, but I had some enriching experiences along the way.

Most notable among these was my getting to know a pleasant young woman named "Vee", who was both a talented, skilled archer and an actual bona (no pun intended) fide swinger… and very open about it. Vee helped me a huge amount in a very difficult time of my life; in 2010 my first wife and I parted ways and I ended up having to live back at home with my parents. I was in a pit of depression and anxiety, but Vee was a true friend who helped give me hope that things would be okay. She also helped me feel more comfortable and confident in talking about and expressing my sexuality — though I might add we never actually "did" anything. Unless playing Halo Reach and talking in great detail about who she'd fucked recently during co-op missions counts.

I miss Vee.

Anyway, as I've alluded to, blogging daily was helpful to me in more ways than one. It helped me meet new people. It helped me get to know others and to express myself. And during a particularly tough time in my life, it acted as a form of "therapy". It kept me going for 2,541 days in total; not bad considering the original objective was just 365 days.

In 2018, I'm in a somewhat better place in my life, though I wouldn't say I'm out of the woods so far as depression and anxiety is concerned; you never really escape those things, sadly. But hopefully these posts will provide a suitable outlet when needed — and those of you reading them will hopefully enjoy getting to know me a bit better!

Thanks for reading.