Blog Time Travel

It’s my fourth year of blogging. I’ve been reviewing my blog a bit and doing research on ways to improve it. One source recommends reusing older blog posts as a way to save time and reuse material. Sounds nice to a thrifty person like myself. So that lead me to digging back into my older posts.

To be honest, some of them are bad, practically shameful. I’m a better writer now than when I started.

I don’t know if anyone would want to read some of my older posts. Some still ring true and while I’d write it differently now they are still relevant. Other posts I’m cringe at and I considered removing altogether. Then I realized these posts are the story of my writing life. My ups. My downs. My wins. My fails. Deleting them would be removing part of my story.

So I’ll be leaving them to show that yes you can improve as a writer. It takes time. It takes diligence. It takes learning. But it can be done.

In my first post, I rambled like a child trying to hit all the corners of the coloring page. I talked all about Living Intentionally. I still agree with many things in this post. Looking back, it’s interesting that the seeds for what I write now, like my cookbook.

By year two I was doing more DIY projects because they were fun and easy with littles running around. I wrote a Dilema in Destruction and so began my foray into copy editing which I now make money doing. Who knew that a broken book would lead to a small income a few years later.

In year three, I had written enough stories to be seriously deep in the query trenches. I was getting burned out. I wrote about Crickets & Feedback as I was to moving through my struggles. Looking back on those darker posts I can read my sadness between those lines. I also smile knowing it all paid off and I found an agent I love.

Here I am today. I write more succinctly. I find my point quickly. To be frank this blog has allowed me to find my personal voice. I can identify it now, not only in my blog posts, but in my picture books and other stories.

So if you’re wondering if blogging is right for you then ask the bigger question of why do you want to blog. The answer needs to be some version of for yourself. Otherwise it won’t be worth it in the long haul.

I encourage you to look back on your writing journey. Take a stock of what you’ve accomplished. How far you’ve come! Look at those mountains and valleys and acknowledge that you climbed those.

Take a step back and see that journey ahead will be more of the same but it’s worth it.

Happy Questing!