Yesterday was a strange kind of farewell for me. On July 16, 2007, I published an essay on my web page and started what I intended to be a blog. The blog quickly turned into a series of essays. From that day through November 13, 2025, I posted an essay every day without missing a single day. I posted when I was sick and when I was well. I posted when I was tired and when I was well rested. I posted when I was busy at work and when I had leisure time. I posted while we were traveling and when we were at home. That is 6,696 days. It is 6.696 essays.

I started the practice in part because I wanted to have a website that invited people to return. I also started the practice because I wanted to teach myself how to become a writer. The website never went viral. I didn’t expect it to. It was much more language-intensive than most other websites. The essays gave me a way to explore my life and share my ideas with others.

Over the years, I have had some loyal and faithful readers who have checked in daily and given me good feedback from time to time.

I was 54 years old when I started posting essays. I started without a plan for how long I would keep up the practice. At one point, I planned to stop daily essays in 2020 when I retired, but the Covid-19 pandemic gave me a renewed sense of the importance of making contact with others. When we retired, we moved away from the congregation and the people we had served for 25 years. I missed the people a lot. I still do. Writing and occasionally getting responses from folk in South Dakota was meaningful to me. And I kept enjoying writing.

I am no longer 54. I am 72. And my writing is taking a turn. I have had a couple of essays published in collections. And I have written a book. I could make a book by pulling together some of the best essays from the past. However, sorting through 6,696 essays is more work than writing a book from scratch. Furthermore, I couldn’t get the essays to hang together. In the end, I used a couple of essays that appeared in my journal, but most were written from scratch, along with the poems and prayers that are a part of the book.

Following my editor's advice, I began thinking about how I could help market the book once it was published. I discovered Substack and started posting to it regularly. I now post one essay, one poem, and one prayer each week. I also designed a new, simplified web page to sell the book and expand my contacts through my email list and social media posts. The new web page has been in the works for some time, but I was waiting until the book could be ordered online before going live.

Thursday, November 13, was the launch day for the new website. I moved my existing website from its old URL, revtedh.com, to revtedh.org. The new website is now live at revtedh.com. For a while, I have decided to keep the old website live at revtedh.org. That is where this essay is being posted.

Yesterday I did not write an essay. I did some cleanup work with my websites, finished the book I was reading, helped our son with a couple of errands, and did a few chores. It felt really strange not to write an essay. An old habit is not easily broken. That is why I am writing this essay today. And it is why I will send a few emails today letting some of my regular readers know that there is one more essay on my website.

I need to say farewell. Farewell to my loyal readers. Thank you for your faithfulness and your interest in my essays. Farewell to a practice that had become a spiritual discipline for me. I will continue to write and journal about important aspects of my life. I hope to write one more book, maybe not for publication, but a kind of memoir for my grandchildren. And I want to write some short stories. I hope that writing fewer essays will allow me to invest my creative energy in other writing projects.

I don’t know if this essay is my swan song or my encore. I certainly do not intend to stop writing essays. I plan to post at least one essay on Substack each week. Right now, I’m publishing them on Tuesdays, but I don’t want to develop a practice that is too rigid. I hope I can also publish short fiction and other genres over time.

I wrote a few paragraphs of a project that might grow into a book one day. It is too early in the process for me to know for sure. Right now, I need to invest time and energy in selling the book that just came out. I have many bookstore visits to make, events to plan, social media posts to make, and more marketing efforts. I plan to begin recording the audiobook version early in 2025.

It will probably take me a while to adjust to the change. I expect to wake up thinking about what topic I might address for a few more days. However, this chapter of my life is closing so that a new one can begin. I’ll leave this website up for a few months. In the background, I am backing up all the files. The website is currently hosted on two servers because I changed servers partway through the process, so archived files are in one location and current files are in another. I want to make sure that all of those things are sorted out and that none of the essays will be lost when I close out my accounts with the servers.

I write with a deep sense of gratitude for 6,696 essays and for the people who have read many of them. Farewell and Godspeed.