Here we are again, another new year, another new calendar to fill. As if that should be any problem? Let me guess that you, too, never seem to have enough time to do so much of what you’re hoping to accomplish, day, week, month, or more. Right?

No matter. This time of the year is typically a moment for reflection of what’s happened in the previous 12 months of our lives and also for planning for our next 12.

Blogging, and my writer’s life in general, are no exception.

Blogging was, I believe, envisioned as a place for “live” journaling, or logging, in a ship captain’s sense, though my flagship Red Barn and four affiliated sites over the past 14 years have always put twists on that by scheduling long in advance. Even with that, each year has somehow always taken on a fresh emphasis.

The Barn started out with a huge backlog of previously published poems and related pieces to share, giving the blog essentially a literary focus. To my surprise, digital photography, especially once I retired from the newsroom, came to the forefront, too. As the pace picked up, marriage, family life, and our “city farm” in Dover provided fresh waves of inspiration, and there were files of unpublished poems and essays to add to the mix. Excerpts from my widespread correspondence and my Quaker writings also came into play. On top of that, publication of my novels and their subsequent revisions widened the perspective, including outtakes, as did my history Quaking Dover and the spirituality investigation Light Seed Truth.

More recently, the focus shifted to Way Downeast Maine where I’ve resettled.

So far, that adds up to more than 6,000 posts.

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In addition, we’ve had the emergence of my quartet of affiliated WordPress blogs, which have undergone their own evolution.

Much of my Quaker-related writing led to establishing As Light Is Sown.

The photography has joined the Talking Money and New England Spirit entries at Chicken Farmer I Still Love You.

Poetry in chapbook presentations, especially, now appear at Thistle Finch editions.

And Orphan George Chronicles make my research findings available to genealogy investigators who share some of my linage.

It’s a lot, but it’s not sitting in dusty files or some editor’s sludge piles.

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In the year ahead here at the Barn, you’ll be seeing excerpts from my physical journals, which started nearly six decades ago. Last year, having wound up on this remote island in Maine, I finally hunkered down revisiting the earliest decade of the books and found much of merit that hadn’t been distilled into my novels or poetry, so we’ll give them a final airing here.

It has me thinking of a poet I’ve dearly loved and his remark that nobody since could pursue the life he did. That remark came after he saw recent real estate prices for marginal properties around the lands he and his cohorts had purchased dirt cheap decades earlier in the Sierra Nevada range of California and then built upon and then realizing they couldn’t afford to buy their places now.

I wish I could advise kids today setting forth some advice for moving ahead.

All I can say is I’m glad I’m not in their place.

Looking back, though, I’m seeing ours was often a difficult journey, too.

Here’s how things unfolded for me. It really was a merry-go-round, something of the continuing nature of this blog.

Much of what’s ahead promises to be more confidential, subjective, off-guard than what you’ve seen from me before.

As always, I do enjoy hearing your comments and sharing your company.