Hi world,

I decided to participate in Blogging101 to kickstart my New Year and hopefully learn some useful tips to improve my blog. Day One has asked us to do an introduction for a new blog or expand a little on what we already have if we’ve been writing for a while.

I’ve been blogging off and on for a few years now, I think I’ve had about 5 different WordPress sites and a few other ones that I can’t remember now. Some of them have faded into the neverlands of “I can’t remember my password” and/or “my email address linked to that account”, others I just got bored with or didn’t like the way it was developing and being a rather anal/autistic/OCD type of person, it was easier to start a fresh blog than try to delete a year or two of posts that I don’t like or want to share anymore.

So why this blog?

In 2014 I challenged myself to do a Year of Gratitude on Facebook. I had a vague idea that I might one day turn the posts into a book but decided once it was over to upload them to my blog and share them with the Universe, just because I can.

I’m still in the process of editing the last few months and tidying up a few loose ends but the whole 12 months is up and available to read if you care to have a look.

As to where to next…..

Well, I’m not sure at this stage.

I signed up for Poetry101 a few weeks ago (loved it, give it a go!) and have signed up for Writing201 in February. At the moment I think the main focus is just getting myself back into the habit of writing and that leads me to why I’m blogging rather than just writing in the closet.

One of the things I discovered about myself during my Year of Gratitude is that I have a really big problem motivating myself. Because I had committed publicly to posting every day for a year I found it a lot easier to push myself each day, out of my comfort zone, out of depression days, and up to the computer to write. When I finished the year I had no reason to write every day and very quickly I found that I wasn’t writing at all.

I love writing but some days I need a push and for me, the commitment of having an audience, (real or imagined) is enough to get me to the computer. Doing courses like this one helps as well and there are plenty of other sites that offer motivation to writers when they can’t find it themselves.

I’d like to develop this blog into a journal that reflects the lessons I learned from committing to a daily act of gratitude as well as anecdotes about life in general, my wife and kids, our farm, pets, autism, art, music, poetry, well just about anything really.

I’m hoping that by the end of this year, I will be fully committed to writing again and will have dragged out my old notebooks and started to seriously devote time to my novel writing.

In the meantime…..

We are about to move house onto ten and a half acres of pasture and bush, I’m exhausted from packing but there is still so much more to do so I better stop doing this and start doing that.

Chat to you all on the commons.

Namaste

Raven

A.L.A.S