Happy Ten Years!

This past June, I was driving late one evening. My mother had a bad fall and was recovering near her home in a rehab hospital. We had visited with her and I was driving home. I was tired. I hadn’t had much time in front of the laptop. I had a million thoughts racing through my head.

I worried that I would forget all the things I wanted to write. Somehow, in that cacophony of alarm bells in my head, I started to think about the creative process. I pondered its give-and-take nature. From those morsels came my attempt to be humorous and write about my own writing process. In July, I published my post The writing process: The long and winding road. The night before it ran, I remember thinking that I kind of liked the piece.

Playing favorites

I liked that I touched on the challenges of editing your own work. I liked the jokes. I liked that it touched on some gallows humor, but overall was still positive and encouraging about being a blogger.

I liked how it made me feel.

Oh, to be clear, I’m like a parent about my work. I love all my children equally. I can tell you about the birth of most everything I write. Was it hard? Was it easy? Where did I get the idea? Did the writing come fast or slow? But some pieces stick with you longer. You remember them well after they’ve been published. For whatever reason, I found the writing process story to be funny. I was pleased with the every-man quality of the piece. In the end, I might not have entertained all that many readers, but I amused myself.

Bring out the cake and candles!

The piece sticks out even more to me this week because I’m celebrating my Tenth Anniversary blogging on WordPress. In my first year, I published once or twice a week. I did that for a while. Later I published daily. Good God what was I thinking! I’ve backed off of that aggressive schedule. I’m blogging three days a week now. I write that with a caveat. Additionally, I rerun one of my pieces on Tuesday and post a simple gratitude post each Saturday.

My milestone has me thinking about the things I love about blogging:

–The anticipation of putting together an interesting piece that comes to me and seeing what others have to say about it ranks as one of my favorite parts of the blog experience. I get an enormous amount of joy and wonder seeing the different reactions — good or bad, positive or negative — to something I’ve written. It’s like I’m a newspaper reporter again. I stop by the local Dunkin Donuts or some other coffee shop. I watch folks skim over the day’s newspaper. I love seeing their reaction to whatever story I wrote for that issue. I’m putting together a puzzle and when I’m done I get to look at wonder at the finished piece of art. It could be a Monet or van Gogh. Or the neighbor kid’s chalk painting that will wash away in a day or two.

–When something happens in the world, I like having a place to turn to say what it means to me. It could be the big stuff, things like world news. But it’s the small things too. A driver cuts me off. Instead of keeping the anger inside of me. I know that I can vent on my blog. I can give the other driver a funny tail or a green ogre face and my readers will understand. I like that I have a place to vent.

–Storytelling has given me confidence to try new things. I can tell a story about something that happened to me and see if others can relate. I can try out new styles of writing. I can collect my writing thoughts for future use.

–Novelist Jodi Picoult had the perfect response to writing. She said, “You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” She summed up another reason why I love being a blogger. It keeps me learning and gives me something to edit and improve.

–My confidence as a writer has grown tremendously since I’ve started blogging. I know now when I’m on a roll. And, I have confidence in myself to get back to that place. I’m like a trail guide or a Sherpa. I have a map and know the way back to me.

Here’s to ten more years of writing.

Related Stories:

• The writing process: The long and winding road
• Tips on writing: Timeless lessons
• Saint Brian!
• On the run from the police
• Nine lessons from my 9th Anniversary

Images by Pexels.