Five Years

November 4 will mark five years of getting published on the web. Sure's a lot easier getting published now than before, in which the bulk of my efforts went to primarily unacknowledged letter to the editor submissions to the Chicago Tribune - although they did publish a few. My greatest achievement was a fairly lengthy letter to First Things magazine sometime in late 1997. I mailed that to them.

I took several months off writing a weekly column for the Partial Observer in the middle of the past five years before resuming again, but throw in my lewrockwell.com articles, some fragments elsewhere, and some longer pieces on this blog, I suppose I've published around 300 essays in the past five years.

Thank God for the Internet, and for my friend Mark Johnson who wanted to start a web magazine, but couldn't think of a name. "I know! I know!" I said, "The Partial Observer."

Imagine what it was like before that. Having something to say, something you knew an audience would appreciate, however small it might be, and not having any outlet get it published. Not having the connections. Not even knowing where to begin.

A lot of my life is still like that. The difference is, now I have written 300 published essays that a bunch of people have read.

So thanks, Mark! And thanks, Lew at LewRockwell.com. And thanks, Blogger! And Out2.com, R. Lee Wrights of Liberty For All, Hanno Beck at The Progress Report, all of you bloggers who've linked to my work, and especially you readers!