This blog is three-years-old today, and Tess' remarkable photo prompt this week at Magpie Tales seemed a perfectly fitting image to use in celebration of the occasion!
Looking back three years ago, this is what I wrote for my first post:
Jumping in
I made this blog yesterday with the title "It's about time" not because I intend to write about time, although I will from time to time write about time, but because I simply haven't been writing and it's about time I did. My intention now is to use this as a journal space to blast out some words. Right now I don't plan on telling anyone I know, including my husband, Mike, that I am writing a blog. Sending my thoughts out into word space is my last idea, really, to free myself to write. I hope it works. I hope that what comes from this is my own writerquake in the 4.0 and above range.
And that will take time . . .
My life has changed in many ways as a result of beginning this blog. The most wondrous are the friends I have met, people whom I now treasure...some as kindreds. In fact, my mother-son relationship with Dex who lives in the Philippines developed via our blogs in that first year, and a twist of fate gave us a chance to meet and spend a week together in 2010.
Structural changes happened swiftly. In about a week's time I changed the blog header to read
Writerquake: it's about time. I dropped the bit about Time altogether in the latter part of the first month, which was also when I showed the blog to my husband. After naming the blog simply Writerquake things began to feel like home here, and actually it is when I began to feel at home in my own skin for more than episodic visitations.
When my blog became a home base for me and I realized that some people actually liked visiting me here, that they left comments that invited and enticed me over to their blogs, I spiffed up the place. In the course of three years I have had five different blog headers and three different templates. My blogroll has changed and grown as I have been super-charged with excitement and awe over the astonishing creativity that abounds in the blogosphere. Truth be told, my blogroll would be as long as a highway if I added every one of you who has dazzled and inspired me at least once. Instead, I passionately "follow" those blogs and have given myself license for that list to stretch to the stars.
Speaking of stars, that is what my own followers are to me. I love you. You honor me by becoming a "Writerquaker" and I honestly think about you when I am working on my posts.
With 768 posts in three years I definitely can attest that blogging has been a catalyst for writing for me. Writerquake was even a catalyst for my second blog, Clutterquake -- begun five months later -- with an entirely different scope and mission.
Not all of those 768 posts entailed creative, personal writing - certainly not - but most were a sharing of my feelings, emotions, opinions, and passions in ways I would not have expressed without my blog. Somewhere in year two I joined the community of poets who are inspired weekly at The Poetry Bus. I have not written a poem each week and I have not been pleased with every poem I have written (I have truly liked a few), but prior to hopping on board the Bus I had written exactly one poem in 14 years.
Then, later on in year two, I became curious to find out about this Magpie Tales blog that I kept seeing mentioned in marvelous posts created as a result of Magpie photo prompts. The photos were spectacular, and individual representations of the weekly images were uniquely varied and ultimately sublime. The magpies I have written since joining this community have not been easy for me. There are weeks when I am truly stumped, when nothing comes. But there have been a few occasions when my muse loves the week's image in equal proportion to my love for the image and I ride a rhythm of words that tumble and flow, and after a bracing little writerquake I am, for a time, content.
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