On June 26th, just over a year ago, I published my first blog. The idea was to “write life.” The first entry was inspired by the frustration of mastering website technology. It was short and passionate, as the best ones are.
My favorites are about my travails: they’re the ones that write themselves. I like finding humor in my drama, and stats have shown they’re also the most popular of my blogs. Coincidentally, I’ve found that when I can transform the horror of, for example, being stung by a scorpion, spider or fire ant into a crazy antic, I lose my grip on the terror.
Finding a topic became much more difficult on the many occasions when no sliver in the foot of my life provoked me to share my misery with my readers. What do I have to say that people will care about, I wondered. I wrote about life here in rural Costa Rica, our travels, and I reacted to life around me. My website got some hits, a lot of them, in fact.
Carter, from my writing group, the Internet Writing Workshop, said, “If your writing is good, people will read it.”
I set out to make my writing live up to the praise bestowed on it by John Timpane, the Op-ed editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer who published two of my essays back in the nineties, just as I was giving up my dream of writing for a job teaching.
He said my writing was sprightly. Some of my blogs are more sprightly than others, but as my husband Jack reminds me, only the mediocre are always at their best.
The struggle to capture blog ideas continues. Like a hunter stalking her prey, I navigate the terrain of my day-to-day life, ever watchful for the atypical animal, the one others haven’t seen in the exact same light.
And I still have the occasional problem with widgets and plug-ins. For example, I’ve tried and tried to get Google Bot Bling to work again, with no success. And I still haven’t reviewed any books on my website or elsewhere, as I planned to do at the start.
But I’m writing, and I’m determined to keep writing. Thanks to all of you who have been faithful readers, and those of you I may never know about. I hope to keep you interested.
