Fifteen years of blogging

I started a blog

Fifteen years ago.

I didn't know how.

I'm not exactly tech-savvy.

But somebody told me that Blogspot made the process pretty easy so I tried.

Sure enough it was.

Easy enough for this 60-year-old to feel like I was writing a blog.

Kind of.

Sort of

Although maybe it felt like I was pretending…

I didn’t really know what to say. Experts would not recommend starting a blog if you didn’t have something to say.  Or until you figured that out.

But hey!  I decided to give it a shot.

Because you see… 

I had heard myself saying… or at least thinking… that I might want to be a writer, but didn’t know what that might mean.

I really had no idea where in the world to start.

I was lucky enough to bump into some people who encouraged me rather than laughing at my silly idea and I eventually came to the conclusion that I could call myself a writer if I was writing. That might have been about the time I heard of the idea of starting a blog.

Oh, yes; I was starting to say…

I decided to give it a shot.

To start a blog.

And so on January 9, 2010, I set up a Blogspot account, make up a quirky little name for my blog, and typed some lines that became my first blog post.  

• I wonder if I should start a new blog.
• I wonder if I can be consistent about blogging regularly.
• I wonder what I should include in my blog.
• I wonder if I should establish certain patterns or routines.
• I wonder if anyone will read my blog.
• I wonder if anyone will like what they read.
• I wonder if anyone will comment…
• I wonder if any of this matters in the greater scheme of things.

I guess I wondered about a lot of things.

Then I realized I must figure out what in the world to write about and how often.  Turns out the experts have opinions about those questions, too - like how you must build an audience and you must post often.  AND consistently!!!  

Wise rules I’m sure, but I might have had the sense to know that I wasn’t really ready for an audience.  I think I somehow knew that I was just writing for me at first.  

This was a chance to practice

To experiment

To try stuff out & see what worked

To brainstorm ideas & topics

So…

I tried out ideas that felt important to me. 

I wondered about things I was curious about. 

I featured quotes that inspire me.

I wrote about gratitude & other virtues I wished to emulate.

About things I was learning.

Sometimes I wrote regularly and other times not so much. It occurred to me that I probably ought to commit to at least a minimum schedule - or I might just trail off and forget to blog.  Indeed that seemed to be somewhat common; lots of bloggers seem to eventually trail off and disappear. 

So I pondered what might be an achievable goal.  Once a week seemed pretty small, but even then I wasn’t really sure I could always do it and didn't want to set myself up for failure.  So I would post at least once a month. Almost embarrassingly minuscule, but maybe I was learning the value of tiny steps.

It turned out to be sufficiently small - and got me through more than one writing slump.  Not all of my posts were wonderful, but I was proud of my consistency in cranking them out for a lot of years.

Until that one time…

Yep, I forgot to write… in February 2023.

I discovered my omission in early March…

Oh, no!  I see that I have failed to post here during February.  

I feel like a failure. 

It was my only real goal for my blog… to post at least once a month… and I have mostly succeeded for well over a decade.

But now I have failed.

What should I do with my failure?  

Too late to fix it.  

Okay; my first thought was that maybe I could still write something and pre-date it.  

To pretend the failure didn’t happen.

To give the appearance of doing well.

Or I can choose to admit my error and move on.

Go ahead and write a post for this month - or maybe even two.

But don’t pretend to be perfect.

...

And what about that name I chose for my blog all those years ago when I didn’t have a clue what I was doing or what I might write about? Wondering as I wander?

I guess I kept thinking about wondering and wandering. Amazingly I have ended up being astounded at how appropriate that label has turned out to be through the years. I wondered about so many things. And sure enough I wandered from one topic to another.

...

But then there came a day a few months later when we made a totally unexpected decision that would completely change our lives - our direction, our schedules, and our location. You might say we “wondered” about the idea of selling our beloved Christmas tree farm and “wandering” the globe for awhile.

Little did we know the wonderings and wanderings that awaited us. 

That such a major change meant that we would wander to so many places.

And we would wonder about so many things.

And... little did I know that I would end up writing a book about those very wonderings and wanderings.