First, I want to send my heart-filled prayers for the comfort of our friends in California. May the horrors of the fires stop and may your recovery be quick. I am so sorry for your loss and pain. My family and I toured a great deal of California this summer and California is EVERYTHING that it is cracked up to be and more . . . . . a beautiful, beautiful natural state filled with very kind and gracious people. My heart is with you.
Second, thank you, readers, so much for your support of my blog. Writing gives me such individual satisfaction and sharing my writing and thoughts with you gives me a sense of purpose and excitement every single day. I get giddy when it is time for me to write. I love connecting with myself and others, in this form!
My writing process is this: I wake up every morning and I do my morning rituals with my family. Once everyone is out of the house or on to their own things (on the weekends and days off), I grab my cup of coffee and I excitedly turn on my computer and I start typing away. I write “on a whim”, so to speak. Most of my posts take me around 45 minutes to write. I have a notebook where I jot ideas down throughout the day for future writings, but many times I don’t even consult my notebook. I just seem to wake up and know what I want to write.
Today, I wanted to share my process with you because I am getting more and more blog subscribers and I am so happy about that – thank you for being willing to add to the clutter of your email account with another daily dose of me! I will tell you though, subscribers, that you are getting the first edition, the first cut of my blog post which will probably go through several edits throughout the day. I think that I did more than 50 revisions on one of my blog posts. Seriously.
After I write my post, I read it around three times before I hit publish. That’s when subscribers get it. After it’s published, I send it to my editor-at-large (otherwise known as my detail-oriented husband) and he gives me feedback and lets me know what typos that he has found in the day’s entry, when he has time. (It’s amazing that even after me reading it over and over, typos are still to be found – almost every single day!)
As I go around doing other daily chores throughout the day, and I do some reading and researching, I invariably come back to my post and end up doing more editing and adding and rearranging, etc. In short, those of you who are my subscribers are getting my first rough draft. I hope that if you wish to revisit the post, you’ll come to the website and see more of “the finished product.”
That being said, writing is a process and it is fluid. I’ve been known to change a post with a new sentence or a new thought, days after I have published it. I consider this blog site my personal diary that I share with love, with my family, friends and cohorts who find it interesting. It is not a well-tailored coat (obviously), but more of a well-worn quilt constantly being added on to, if that makes sense.
Bottom line, I’m not going to tell you how to read my blog. I’m just grateful that you want to read it. Just know that what you read in your in-box, may end up being a little bit different on the website. If you are one that gets aggravated by typos (I admit that I do), you might prefer to read the blog on the website, later in the afternoon.
My husband shared this quote with me the other day that he saw on the bottom of someone’s email. I love it and I’ll end with it:
“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.” – Kurt Vonnegut