It's all in the planning!

My blog, It’s All In the Planning, is gone. Officially, I let it lapse on the 19th of last month. For years, I had toyed with shutting it down, yet each time the renewal reminder arrived, I gave in and paid the fee out of habit and sentiment. But there comes a point when even old projects deserve their rest.

It’s All In the Planning was my second attempt at blogging. The real beginning was with ssquah.wordpress.com, which I started in 2007 when The Star temporarily ended my chess column in February that year. That little WordPress blog was my way of filling the sudden void. I needed a release for my creative energy and found it in a blog. Unfortunately, WordPress in its infinite wisdom decided one day that I had violated something or other, and suspended it without warning.

Frustrated but unwilling to stop, I moved on to a local hosting provider and set up It’s All In the Planning. I even reproduced all my earlier writings there so nothing was lost. That’s the blog that lasted the longest, and in a sense became my most enduring online home.

When I finally ignored the automated emails asking me to renew the domain, letting it slip away on the 19th of July, it felt like closing the door on a chapter that had been with me for well over a decade. Traffic had dwindled to almost nothing, and I hadn’t written anything new there for years. The site had become a shadow of its former self, and the stories had already been safely archived, so there was no risk of losing them. What remained was only a domain name and my own stubborn attachment to the past.

Now, anyone visiting the site would be greeted only by the blunt finality of an error page: a simple punctuation mark at the end of a long, quiet sentence. 

Nevertheless, writing never really stops. It only shifts its ground. What I once poured into It’s All In the Planning has long since found continuity here on this present blog, Anything Goes. The voice there is the same as the voice here, only tempered by time and filled with more reflection as I grow older. Those first two blogs may be gone, but the act of writing carries on. One chapter closes, another continues.