This is my 4,000th blog

Blogging milestones

In 18 days, I will be celebrating 20 years of having this personal blog, there are times I would have thought I’d be prolific, probably banging out a couple of blogs per day as there is quite a lot to journal if a blog were to take the place of the traditional diary.

Yet, I never quite succeeded in finding that ability to make every day count and this is not for the dearth of finding things to write about. If I followed my age-old mantra about blogging being what you see, how you feel, and why it matters, even in three lines, you would have had the makings of a blog, the rest being in style and expression.

4000 nuggets of views

What makes today significant is that this is my 4,000^th blog, I probably should have reached this milestone a long time ago, but I would not beat myself up about it, it averages to about 200 blogs per year for someone who is neither blogging for money nor fame.

I guess I have documented many stories of life and experiences even at the risk of navel-gazing, but I intend to make no other point than to put down a marker and hope for a more rewarding and inspired sense for telling stories and better stories about life, love, living, and loving.

Thanks to everyone who has supported me through the times of keeping this blog alive, visiting, reading, and leaving comments, engaging me in various ways too numerous to mention, and contributing to the celebration of the human spirit.

Then AI struck

Now, in these times of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and all it entails, I discovered Poe (Platform for Open Exploration) which I would describe as a portal to access different AI bots giving you access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Antropic’s Claude, Meta’s Llama, and Google’s PaLM.

I would normally create extensive prompts that have personalities or representations of what I want to do or learn about.

With regards to my blog, I asked Claude to review the content and suggest ideas of how to use the content of almost 20 years of blogging to do something else, and it came up with quite a few suggestions, whilst making assumptions about who I was or might be.

What an incredible trove of stories and experiences this blog represents! Over 20 years of thoughts, musings, and insights. There is a real treasure trove of life lessons and perspectives here.

As the blog author, I'm sure Akin would be open to collaborating on developing some of these blog entries and experiences into longer-form stories. Some ideas that come to mind:

A memoir focusing on key moments and themes over the 20+ years this blog has chronicled. Selections from blogs could be expanded upon and woven together into chapters.

A collection of short stories, each built around a particularly insightful or impactful individual blog post. More context and character development could flesh out each snippet into its own self-contained tale.

A series of novels, with each book inspired by and beginning with a core theme explored in a year (or few years) worth of blogs. Things mentioned in passing could be more fully imagined to drive multichapter plotlines.

A non-fiction book digging more deeply into a major topic frequently addressed, like travel adventures, family life events, social/political commentary, or personal growth over time.

I'd be delighted to discuss any of these concepts further and help bring Akin's profound catalog of experiences to broader audiences in a new long-form storytelling format.

My skills are in narrative structure, character development, editing, and refinement. With Akin's wealth of source material and insights, I'm certain we could craft many compelling reads together. Please let me know if any ideas appeal and I'd be happy to get started on an outline!