In November, 2011, I published 9 posts.  I had written 6 of them.  The remaining 3 were written by 2 guest bloggers.  One of those posts tends to get hits around here on a regular basis.

In December, 2011, I published three posts. That’s all.  Just three.

One of those was an annual post I put up publicizing my resolutions for the coming year.  The very first one I listed was this:

Publish a blog a day.  You’ll be able to find these under the “Letters From The Past” section of this site.  The challenge is going to be to come up  with something worthy of publishing on a daily basis.  Expect some crap every once in awhile though.

To be honest, I either don’t know, or I don’t remember what prompted me to undertake such an ambitious goal.  Perhaps I was ticked at the fact that I was paying a nominal fee on an annual basis to host a website which I wasn’t exploiting to it’s full potential.  Maybe I wanted to spur along my writing abilities.  Maybe I just wanted to build an impressive presence on the web.  None the less, my first entry on the matter just indicated that it was time to step things up with my writing.

For whatever reasons I had to do it, one thing remains certain.

I did it.

I can safely say at this point that I’ve done more writing in the last 12 months than at ANY point in my life before.  That includes the writing I did when I was first introduced to it in 5th grade, the time I put in through various Journalism classes, writing for the school newspapers, and the first two and a half years of TharpSter.Org.

Understandably so, I find myself hard pressed to identify my favorite posts born of Letters From The Past.  Even more challenging, is to find some of them.

As you may be aware, this site was off line for a week in the middle of December.  The content has been reloaded, however we’re still in the process of restoring all of the categories and tags to the posts.

Finding my favorites won’t be as easy as calling up all of the posts which are categorized as a “Personal Favorite”.  Yay me.

At this point, I’ve identified at least 16 posts under the Letters From The Past banner which garnered a certain favorability in my mind as worthy of the level of quality I was shooting for.  I’m sure there are several others.  Without the benefit of my tags and categories, I’m relegated to reading each and every one of those posts over again to find my favorites.

For the 16 posts I’ve identified so far, I’ve updated the categories on them so that they appear as a Personal Favorite.  You can see these posts along with the Personal Favorites written in past years right here.

Unlike yesterday where I discussed each of the individual crowd favorites, I’m not going to do that with each of my favorites.  I will, however, call attention to three particular entries.

The Tufted Titmouse – In the 3 1/2 years that TharpSter.Org has been up and running, I haven’t endeavored to write a great deal of fiction.  Chalk it up to a lack of creativity or patience, I don’t know.  During the year, I made a few attempts at it and was more pleased with the outcome than I originally expected.  I’m hoping to publish more in the coming year.

The Tufted Titmouse came out of a couple of brain farts I encountered with the idea to patent a computer mouse that looked like a female breast.  Realizing that I would probably never feed my inner Thomas Edison by inventing and marketing such a product, I took the next best step by writing a story around the idea.  The story had a sad ending which didn’t even present itself to me until it was time to write that part.

The Legend Continues – I characterized this one as fiction, but it wasn’t really based on an original story idea.  Instead, it was the retelling of an old joke I heard somewhere in junior high.  The original joke told about a herd of bulls that lived on a earthquake prone mountain.  The punch line of the joke was ultimately the slogan for Weebles, a toy that was big in the 70’s.  I generally changed the herd of bulls to a herd of pit bulls, and embellished it in a way that was my own.

Hot Tub BB Gun – Earlier today when I was combing through my 2012 entries and identifying my favorites, I ran across this one and couldn’t stop laughing at it.  Perhaps I’m the only person who found it as funny as I did because I’m the only witness to the events that day.  I still have very vivid memories of watching my victim hop the way he did when I shot him in the foot with a BB gun.

So there you go.

Letters From The Past is hereby declared a success.  Some of them worked while others didn’t.  Some of them generated traffic while others barely made a peep.  Some them evoked emotions good and bad.  Some of them fell short while others soared.

All in all, I can officially say that I’ve carried out one of the most ambitious New Years Resolutions I’ve ever made.

What’s next?