The number 1600 holds a special significance for me, because I spent seven years of my life, from October 1975 to the end of April 1982, at 1600 kHz on the AM dial at WCWC in Ripon, Wisconsin.
Those were the days when FM radio was just starting to become its own thing. In fact, it was during those seven years that we stop simulcasting the AM signal and gave WCWC-FM its own identity, an easy listening station called WYUR. I thought it was clever: The music is Y-U-R here, even if we never used that as a slogan. Neither station still has the same call letters, for what that’s worth.
And now the radio station and this particular blog post are linked in my personal history. This is the 1,600th consecutive day that I have posted something at warrenbluhm.com, the longest streak of consistent writing I’ve ever sustained.
For the record, that’s four years, four months and 17 days since I last neglected to add a post to this little corner of the blogosphere. I confess I’m a little proud of this streak.
These past 100 days have been the most interesting of this particular year in terms of my growing publishing empire. I composed a little fantasy over a series of posts about me and my two golden retrievers saving the world from extinction, which I turned into Dejah & Summer in the Time of Magic, now on sale here and at your favorite independent book store.
I also transformed the other book I published this year, War IS the Crime, into A Declaration of Peace, rebranding it to emphasize not my disgust of war but my proposed alternative — advocating that we love our neighbors and, by the way, every human on this planet is our neighbor. That’s also on sale here and at your favorite independent book store.
And I am 100 days closer to becoming a full-time author. Ready or not, I plan to retire from my newspaper job on May 19, 2025, the 50th anniversary of my first day as a news guy. I have less than 200 days to craft and launch the next phase of my life.
That means I have a lot of work to do between now and when I post for the 1,700th straight day. Wish me luck, pray for me, or both.
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P.S. I accidentally posted this post 24 hours early, on Monday instead of Tuesday, and discovered the error when a couple of people “Liked” it within a few minutes. I unpublished it — but what do I do now? Oh, heck, it’s out there. I’ll figure something else out for the actual 1600th day. (Presses “Publish” again.)
