Five years ago, I wrote my first post on Oh Ick.
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It was the first entry (escape goat) in what would become my Fictionary, a whimsical collection of pseudo-neologistic puns of varied import—many of which I’m quite proud (religual, Stürmisch und Drang, anthropomoralism, politheism).
However, if you go all the way back to the beginning (though why would you?), you’d find that escape goat isn’t the earliest post on the blog. That’s because, for some reason, I decided to post the two videos I made right before leaving for ten days in Iceland (arriving just in time for New Year’s in Reykjavík). I don’t know why I posted them, nor why I bothered to backdate them, since they’re both pretty empty—nothing more than testing out my camera, in fact. But there you have it.
Nor did Oh Ick actually go live that day. I had planned to get a few entries up, especially the Iceland videos. But I accidentally hit “Publish” after uploading that first Iceland video and, after a few moments of panic, decided I might as well just leave it up.
Another fun fact: escape goat isn’t even the oldest post on the blog, since I later republished a pair of posts from 2010. Both posts were more or less about Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America. (Part I is (in part) a review of the book; Part II-ish is more about why the book resonated with me so much.) Those appeared on my previous blog, Whiskey Rocks, which is somehow still available online despite ten years of neglect.
I booted up Oh Ick intending to have it support a career—or, perhaps, a side hustle—as a writer. It’s not been a resounding success in that regard. I did get a couple stories out: the very short story The Ride; and a longer short story, “Emily’s Grave,” that I’m turning into something more, with the (paid!) help of a former student and brilliant animator, John Irvine. (More on that soon, I hope…) I like both stories a lot, but this is a far cry from The year of living short fiction that I’d announced.
Nonetheless, I feel pretty good about five years of Oh Ick, even with all the caveats, fallings-short, and absences.
Here’s to another five!