Happy Blogiversary to Me!

I've been blogging for exactly one year now, it seems. As I've never had a blogiversary before, I don't know what one ususally does to celebrate it, so I will just make something up.

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I know! I'll make my blogiversary a time to revisit my first and second entries, which lay out the general scheme of the blog as I first envisioned it, and try to chart the blog's progress along that path (or branching off of it, as the case may be). It will be a time of reflection and introspection. And cake.

Well, the most obvious divergence from the initial plan is the inclusion of posts that aren't about books. I mostly did that because, if I only posted after I finished a book having to do with autism, I'd be posting only once every month or two.

Another thing that follows somewhat from that is that I've brought a lot more of myself to the blog than I had initially intended. In blogging about autism research, I bring the scientific part of myself to the front, and in blogging about feminism and about my own life, I allow more of my personality, philosophy and ethics to show through. I do not think these are bad things.

In my second entry, I have a list of themes I hoped to track through their various permutations in different works. I've only gotten to some of these, though I definitely have posts waiting about others. Also, it was part of my general plan to review a bunch of books before jumping into compare-and-contrast mode.

By far, I've written the most posts about autism and gender. I've also managed to write a fair amount about empathy and metaphor, and maybe obliquely dealt with distance in these posts. I haven't done much with the idea of first contact, or anything at all with narrative.

I also think I'm slowly adding another theme to the list: context. This refers both to the environment through which a given autistic character moves, and its effect on him or her, but also the extent to which the whole society in which he or she lives defines autism (and, by extension, the character). I think sci-fi is most conducive to this kind of analysis, if only because sci-fi writers make up whole societies, so they have to spend more time describing them than plain old fiction writers, who are free to restrict their scope to the characters' private lives.

I'm also gearing up to do another series of posts, this time on basic autism science. Look out, Internet!