In January of 2008 I began my blogging adventure here on the internet. Here’s the very first paragraph I wrote on One Writer’s Journal.
Hi, everybody. I’m just a country girl who’s been writing forever. I hope to share some of what I’ve learned about writing over the years and some about being a country girl through and through.
And the last paragraph in that first blog:
I’ll tell you more about growing up in the country next post. Wouldn’t want to give away all my secrets the first day. These blogs have a ravenous appetite for words.
Boy, was I right about that ravenous appetite of blogs! Words, words and more words. I first posted about writing here on this blog in 2013 when I had written my 544th post. Now seven years later, this will be my 1469th post. Wow. Maybe I should have written five more books instead. But I like journal writing as I said in Post 2 back in 2008.
I’m figuring out what exactly I want to write about in my blog. I’ve been a journal writer forever, but that’s writing to myself. Now this may be writing to myself too, but it’s like leaving my journal open out on the kitchen table where anybody can read it. That might be okay. I’ve done some of my best writing in journals. How about you? Are you a journal writer?
Since then I’ve left my journal open on a lot of nights. I want you to know I’ve appreciated each and everyone of you who has taken a peek. I love reading your comments and I hope you’ve had fun with some of the giveaways and games I’ve posted here.
I do try to remember this bit of advice from Liz Strauss. “The Internet has no eraser.” Once something is posted, it’s out there. It’s hard to grab any of your words back and make them completely disappear. So I’ve done my best to share encouraging words and fun stories.
The picture up top is the one I posted on that 2013 post. It’s me a long time ago when I was only beginning to scribble words in notebooks to make stories. I also think there’s an uncanny resemblance between me and the Jocie model and the poses of the pictures to the cover of Scent of Lilacs. What do you think?
I’ve scribbled and typed and word processed millions of words since then. And hope to have another million or two in my fingers. Right now I’m needing to come up with a few thousand new words for my work in progress and that’s why I’m cheating a little on this post by borrowing some lines from one of my older posts. Sometimes you just have to use a few words over.
Some of that next million will be here on One Writer’s Journal where the great thing about blogging is this from an anonymous (no doubt blogging) writer. “Blogging is not rocket science. It’s about being yourself and putting what you have into it.”
“Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.” (Andrew Sullivan)
Writing out loud. That’s a good way to look at blogging.
So what do you think? Do you like to blog? Read blogs? What advice would you suggest to make my next 500 plus blogs more fun to read?