Several times during 2006, members of the church where I was Rector urged me to begin a blog. I was intrigued by the idea, but felt that I was too busy. Finally I thought I would give it a try. My first entry was posted on October 9 on that year.
Thanks to a good-sized, active congregation with interested and supportive readers, the blog was an instant hit. In some circles of the Episcopal Church and beyond, I had a reputation for being a good writer, and before long I had readers across the nation also, and even in other parts of the world. I was very gratified when I had a hit or two from Vatican City.
I retired in 2012. During my active years, I had posted entries several times a month on topics that interested many people, but even then over the years I posted less and less often.
In November 2012, I retired. After my retirement, I posted even less frequently, until my blogposts appeared very seldom. As expected, my reading audience dwindled, and the posts were seldom commented on. The tracker on my blog showed that my posts were hardly even read at all. When my readership dropped to only one or two people who visited only on rare occasion and comments dropped to zero, I decided the time had come to stop blogging.
But I liked what I had written, and the posts conveyed a great deal of my personal history. I decided to self-publish them in a book. That volume will only reproduce what I wrote; it will not include the responses from readers. As long as Blogger will continue to feature my blog online, I suppose the posts will be available there, along with people’s responses.
The book will be available on Lulu.com under the title JohnOneFive, with authorship by David Baumann.
I
was, and remain, grateful to the many supporters I had during the active years
of this blog. But its time is now past.
