On 1st January this year I decided to write a new blog entry for every single day, each one pegged to something that happened on that date somewhere in history. Today is 30th June. That is 181 days, and I have a published entry for every one of them. Two hundred posts now live on this site, and 183 of them are “this day in history” pieces - the rest are essays I wrote on the side, when something else demanded saying. The project has, more or less, swallowed the blog whole. To be fair, that was rather the point.
I will not pretend it has been a straight line. Some weeks the writing came easily - an event with a clean shape, a clear villain or a clear irony, and the piece practically wrote itself. Other days I sat down with nothing, or with three competing events on the same date and no good reason to pick one over the others. Travel cost me days. So did weeks where work left nothing over by evening. On eighteen separate occasions I ended up publishing two entries on the same date - not because that day was unusually rich in history, but because I had fallen behind and was catching up, backdating nothing, just stacking the work until it was done. The archive looks unbroken from the outside. From the inside it was a person occasionally writing two thousand words at midnight to keep a promise he had made mostly to himself.
The promise has held anyway, and I am surprised by how much that matters to me. A daily habit either survives contact with a real life or it does not, and mine has had plenty of contact - flights, deadlines, a stretch of illness, the ordinary chaos that derails most resolutions by February. I expected to fail at this somewhere around week six. I have not, and the fact that I have not has become its own reason to continue. Day 181 of 365 is a real milestone, not a symbolic one: six full months of evidence that the habit holds, with the other half of the year now the only thing standing between me and a complete year of days.
The unexpected return on all this has been mine. I brushed up on Russian history and arrived somewhere knowing actual names and actual mechanisms instead of vague impressions - Sergei Witte’s railways, the gold standard, the manifesto that promised a parliament. I learned that the Tunguska explosion still has no agreed explanation 118 years later, which is the kind of fact that should be better known than it is. I learned how many border disputes are really arguments about who gets to police a strait, dressed up as arguments about flags. Researching a single date forces a kind of depth that browsing never does, because you cannot stop until you understand what actually happened and why it mattered, and that discipline has taught me more in six months than several years of casual reading managed.
None of it would be worth as much without somebody on the other end of it. I write these knowing a handful of people read each one, and that has turned out to be enough motivation to get me through the days when motivation was the only thing missing. If you have been reading along, thank you - and if you have opinions, corrections, or a date you think deserves better treatment than I gave it, get in touch. Every message gets read. The second half of the year starts tomorrow, and I intend to be standing here again on 31st December with 365 entries and the same habit still intact.