Good lord, it’s been 5 years of blogging (or almost 20, depending on how you count it)

So somehow, it’s been five years this week since I started blogging here!

And in raw numbers, it’s actually almost TWENTY frickin’ years since I started blogging for the first time at my original incarnation of scribbling from 2004-2012. That’s a lot of my words on the internet, at least until Elon erases it all.

More importantly, my return to blogging in 2018 kicked off a real renewed interest on my part in the writing end of journalism. I’ve been a working journalist for a long time now, but for many years I found myself focusing more on editing, design and (ugh) management.

Finally I remembered how much I love the act of writing, of reporting and digging for odd facts and talking to interesting strangers. Diving back into blogging in 2018 after a hiatus of several years jumpstarted that part of my brain. 

I began to write more and make a concerted effort to build a kind of freelance career down here in New Zealand, in addition to other journalism work. 

I’m happy to say I’ve submitted more than 170 invoices for paid writing since 2019, written articles for websites, newspapers and magazines all around the country and at least a hundred or so other non-bylined pieces for Radio New Zealand, where I’ve been working since 2021 and a place I deeply respect for providing quality, diverse and important journalism down in this part of the world.

This website also helped me bring back my long, long-dormant comic book Amoeba Adventures, when we were all stuck in those dreary, uncertain early days of the pandemic a few years back. The Covid hiatus seemed like a really good time for me to pull out all my ancient comic strips and scan and throw them on the internet as I’d been meaning to do for ages. I put nearly 50 of my 1990s small press comics up to download (for FREE! hurray!) and looking at all my old goofy Prometheus comics finally inspired me to pick up a pencil again for the first time since 1998 and write and draw six brand new issues of Amoeba Adventures to date.

In other words, blogging here reminded me why words matter, why art matters when everything else is annoying as hell in this increasingly fractured, fractious world. 

More than ever, the past year or so has convinced me that blogging feels more like a natural home for my writing than the endless bickering and hot-takes and rage-scrolling of social media. I left Twitter (I refuse to call it “X”) about a year ago, before it all really went to shit, and haven’t regretted it once, watching it spiral down into a miasma of hate, conspiracy and misinformation. I’ll link to my stuff on Facebook and Instagram, but this site is where I want to commit most of my “spare” writing time rather than arguing with strangers on the internet or whatever.

These days the blog is kind of my writing workshop where I babble about things that maybe don’t quite meet the standard of paying work, or are a little too esoteric, plus linking back to my other projects.

Somehow I’ve bashed out 319 posts on here the last five years – I try to get one up a week, and these days focus mostly on quirky pop culture writing rather than sharing every detail of my life, because that all got pretty old pretty quickly on the internet, didn’t it?

I’ve enjoyed seeing what “takes off” here as you never know whether two people or 2000 will read a post on the weird internet of 2023. A little tribute to Yoko Ono I wrote in 2021 has proven perhaps the most read post I’ve ever done, while other ones that constantly pop up on my “most read” site statistics are an appreciation of The Thin Man films, a look at presidential biographies, and an obituary for the late great grunge icon Mark Lanegan. (And then there’s my ode to Jimmy Olsen comics, which I still maintain are the best comic books of all time and which decorate this celebratory blog post.)

Writing here, generally, makes me feel good about myself, even I’m just tossing words about in a random mix to see what sticks. I write for myself, first and foremost, but I am hugely appreciative of those who’ve followed my website, or my comics, the past few years as Writer Nik attempted to come out of his musty old shell.

All you folk who leave a comment or click a link or download a comic are tops in my book! Cheers and here’s to more words to come!