Anticipation of Things Future

Fifteen years ago, when I started this blog, I called the first post Remembrance of Things Past. It seems like an odd way to begin a chronicle that literally had no past at that point. But it gives me a perfect title for today’s entry, written on the last day of the year, which will be the 1245th and last post of this blog. I’ll call it “Anticipation of Things Future.”

First, I owe a little bit of explanation to the small group of people who read this blog regularly. Why didn’t I tell you that I was going to wrap this blog up so soon? The answer is that I didn’t know! I made up my mind just within the last week. One day I was talking with my wife about some computer issues I’ve been having. My laptop has been getting increasingly finicky, and I complained to her that I will probably have to get a new one soon. But why should I? This blog is essentially the only thing I use my laptop for. For everything else I use my desktop computer, a Mac. The only reason I keep a toe in the Microsoft Windows world is that Fritz, the computer chess program, runs on Windows.

And that’s when it hit me. When this blog was fresh and new, I wouldn’t have thought twice about getting a new laptop. But the fact that I wasn’t really even sure that it was worth it… means that it isn’t worth it. Or to put it in a more positive way: I’ve accomplished everything I ever wanted to with this blog. I’m satisfied. I can let it go now.

As I’m sure many of you have noticed, but have been too polite to say, my blog has been losing momentum for several years. I write fewer posts and have fewer readers than I used to. In 2015, my peak year, the blog had 56,545 views and I wrote 93 posts. This year I’ve had 10,002 views and written 27 posts. (Thanks to the five people who have viewed it so far today, putting it over the 10,000 threshold on the very last day of the year!)

That’s one reason for wrapping it up, but not the decisive one. If I still had a lot of things I wanted to say, it wouldn’t matter whether the audience was large or small. But the pandemic, and my exit from regular tournament chess, has given me less to write about. I tried getting back into the tournament scene this year, playing two tournaments, but both of them were disasters.

I felt guilty about those bad tournaments, guilty because I let my readers down and myself down. I do not want this blog to turn into a woe-is-me recap of my defeats. At this point I’m still undecided about whether and how much I’m going to get back into tournament chess, but doing it just so that I can keep my blog going seems like the wrong reason. I have to admit that my desire to play tournament chess is waning. More and more, I find myself thinking that it’s time for White and Black to end their endless battle, shake hands and declare a truce.

Finally, this blog is a lot of work. I have always really worked hard on crafting my posts — and it seems as if I work harder and harder as time goes on. I do love the craft of writing, but maybe there are other things that I should use it on.

Now that I have thoroughly depressed all of you, let me talk about the positives! First of all, I am so grateful to everyone who has read and enjoyed this blog. It constantly amazed me when people would come up to me at tournaments and say, “I read your blog.” It made me feel as if I was someone in the chess world, and also that I was writing something that people enjoyed.

I also loved the comments, which were of such high quality and often taught me things that I didn’t know. That’s one thing that makes a blog more satisfying than a diary. A diary entry just sits there, exactly the way that you wrote it, but a blog post spontaneously grows into something better.

For me, one unexpected joy of this blog was the way that it intertwined with Mike Splane’s chess parties, which he organized monthly from about 2009 to 2021. Mike was, among other distinctions, the most frequent commenter on this blog. His chess parties gave me great material, from games to philosophical insights like how to form a plan, and why forced moves are often underrated. I’m happy that I was able to use this blog to introduce readers to ideas like the Mike Splane Question. Also I’ve been able to publicize his book, Chess Wizardry, both here and in Chess Life. I was thrilled when John Watson wrote a review of Mike’s book in the October 2022 issue of Chess Life! It’s as if we’re keeping Mike alive, in a small way.

Another satisfying thing that happened very late in the lifetime of this blog was winning the Chess Journalists of America award for Best Chess Blog in 2021. I never expected to get any kind of award for this blog, and I think I earned it in part just for sticking around long enough! In 2007, when I started, blogs were all the rage, but very few blogs from that era on any subject are still going. I’d like to think that the award also was a public recognition of 50 Years of Chess, my pandemic project in which I wrote 50 posts on my 50 years in chess, highlighting one game per year. In fact, the one piece of unfinished business for this blog is to collect all of those posts into one downloadable PDF. If I can do that easily, I’ll post the PDF in January 2023.

Now let me turn to the title of this post: anticipation of things future. What is left to look forward to? Well, first, I look forward to trying to get back into tournaments again, doing it for the right reasons and perhaps being better prepared. There’s a new group organizing tournaments in California called 1000 Grandmasters, whose goal is to create a chess “ecosystem” in the U.S. that would make it possible for the country to support 1000 grandmasters. It’s been a problem since forever: so many of the most talented players get to the end of their teenage years or their college years and find that chess is just not a realistic profession. 1000 Grandmasters hopes to change this with a donation-based model. To some extent, Rex Sinquefield is already doing that, but you always have to worry about the sustainability of a model that relies on the generosity of one person. We’ll see if 1000 Grandmasters can offer a better or at least a complementary approach.

What would it take to have 1000 grandmasters in the U.S.? That would be about three grandmasters per million people — the same relative population as in Lithuania (3.05 per million) and the Czech Republic (2.85 per million) and far fewer than Iceland (36.92 per million). But it would be a twelve-fold increase for the United States (0.25 per million, as of 2013). It seems scarcely possible… but “impossible” is the sort of thing that old people say. We’re talking today about reasons to look forward.

Also in the “anticipation of things future” department, I hope to get to work on a new mathematics book in 2023. I have a co-author, and we’ve sent out a proposal, but it’s been harder than expected to get an agent interested. The first two declined. The third one sounded extremely enthusiastic when we contacted him in November, but now we haven’t heard from him for a month and I have to wonder what’s going on. If it doesn’t work out with him, maybe we will go back to pitching publishers without an agent, because I know of at least two publishers that would be interested.

Maybe I will also look for new volunteer opportunities. At age 64, I really don’t have to hustle for work as much as I once did, and I would like to try to find other ways to make a difference. Writing books is one way, but also I’ve been thinking about things like sponsoring or helping refugee families. Or maybe teaching chess in the prisons. Or … ? I’ve barely even begun to think about the possibilities. I should try to think of this phase of my life as a time to feel more free than before, and free especially to try new things.

Of course, trying new things inevitably means letting go of some old things, but there is nothing wrong with that. Especially when the old thing has given me as much joy as this blog. There’s a lot of satisfaction in putting the last pot into the kiln, the last stitch into the quilt, or the last period on the page, and saying, “There. It is finished.”

Thanks, once again, to all of you for reading.

Finally, if any of you want to contact me for any reason, and if you’re not a bot, my e-mail is scribe (at) danamackenzie (dot) com. I’ll be glad to hear from you.

Happy New Year!