Today marks my seventh anniversary of starting to blog. Although I started my scribbles on a homeschooling blog site, very soon I switched over to Blogger because I enjoyed the design elements and the various widgets available.
Over the past seven years, I've taught myself a good bit about blog design. As much as I would have loved to hire someone to build me a beautiful blog, a decided lack of funds prevented me from paying someone to design this blog for me. So I read a lot, tried a lot of different things, failed a lot, and, ultimately, learned a lot.
At the height of my blogging lifestyle, I was posting at least five times per week. But over the past few years, my writing has taken a decided turn in a different directions, and now I write fiction which I publish online. I used to post a chapter a week--short chapters of 2000-2500 words, but as I finished my second novel and started my third, my chapters had edged up to 3500-5000+ words, and posting weekly became that much more difficult.
I managed to continue posting nearly weekly chapters until this January when teaching overlapping classes at Brave Writer and teaching a very full high school expository writing class for our homeschool co-op Class Days overhwhelmed me. I managed to complete my second novel of over 230,000 words on January 5, but since then have only posted a prologue and seven chapters of my third novel. I've received nearly three million reads/hits since starting to write fiction fewer than three years ago, but something had to give in the writing department, and I'm afraid that it was blogging.
But I will continue to post here as I can, and my archives are extensive and are accessed often. I will attempt to post weekly, but when our home school year #16 begins in less than two weeks, I don't know if I will have the time to do so. I'll try to keep up the Quotation of the Week and the Book of Common Prayer Collects in the sidebar, and I am keeping up with the books I've read and the films I've watched this year (which you'll find by scrolling way down the sidebar).
I'll also keep you posted on the Brave Writer and other classes I'll be teaching this year, plus what I'll be teaching our remaining two students here at home now that we've graduated two of our four kids.
So thank you, those of you who have stuck by me through thick and thin for the past seven years, and thanks to you who have joined me sometime along the journey.
Oh, and a wonderful blog recommendation: one of my former writing students is keeping a blog of her three years of missions work in the Czech Republic. Her wit is refreshing, her sense of irony well-honed, and her insights quite profound. You may read her blog here: Thousand Spires.
So now I'm off to continue the journey of a writer, modern-day contemplative Christian, and wife and mother/teacher to my own....
Warmest regards,
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