Milestone.
I’m not a Top Ten blogger. I haven’t published an e-book and made thousands of dollars on it in within a week. No one is begging me to write for them. Yet here I am, still typing away.
Things, actually, are going according to plan. Rome wasn’t built in a day and “changing my life” is still a work in progress. For many years I was guided by knowing only what I did NOT want to do with my life. As if I could not permit myself to consider making a living by doing the only thing I ever really wanted to do, the one thing that seems to come as easily as breathing. That realization set this blog into motion.
Every Sunday for the past year I sat down at the keyboard and started typing. The words just come to me. Maybe I had a great art class that week to talk about, or had come off a night of babysitting the nephews, sometimes I have a topic rolling around in my brain, or one that rudely thrusts itself to the front of the line. The only posts I wrote in advance were the ones that I scheduled to publish while on our Caribbean cruise.
This blog began one year ago as a place for me to show how I write; a place to be accountable, consistent and public about my effort to become a freelance writer. Absent a portfolio, this is it – 52+ writing examples.
Something funny happened along the way. I won an essay contest. A friend helped me to edit a short story. I’ve started writing articles for a local weekly newspaper. While I’ve been blogging on and on about changing my life…it did change.
Slowly and deliberately. Steady and true. This is Year One of my new life. The one where I work creatively, doing what I love. My new life of writing.
There is so much waiting in the wings; imagine what changes will come once I can work at it full time, with a 100% time investment in this NEW life. Over the past year, I returned often to this guiding quote by American author E.L. Doctorow:
“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Mile marker “Year One” just came into sight.