This Is This Is One

Read the The Sum Of All Years

Blogday – woohoo! I was thinking it might be best to mark the occasion. A sonnet? Haiku? Small gathering of likeminded websites? Or maybe an autobiography. Yeah. An autobiography in a blog. An, if you will, (smirk), blogography (snort).

Like with most of my ideas, I started to talk myself out of it almost immediately. I thought that there’s not much to write about that happened when I was really young, because I don’t remember as much about then as I do about the last five years. Any stuff relating to me as a ten year old, would be about, erm, ten words long. But then people who read online don’t generally want to read a lot, so that might be a good thing. They like bitesize chunks of life, so why not break the years down into separate entries?

Meg did something cool last year with Project Mayfly, where you got to sum up your year in twenty words or less.

That could work. There may well be ten words for my ten year old entry, but there would be a lot more for, say, twenty five years old.

Then it hit me: I would write an autobiography where the word count for each post is limited to the number of the corresponding age for that entry. Ten words for ten years old, eleven words for eleven years old and so on. Hmm – I can do that. It’s punchy and it’s totally word-geek me. It’s got that “simple complexity” thing that I really like.

And I just worked out how many words I would have to work with:

1+2+3…+15+16…+32+33=561

A life in 561 words. It seems easy, but that’s probably because I haven’t started yet.

Socrates wrote that the unexamined life was not worth living, so in that spirit, Project The Sum Of All Years is launched.

On Monday.