Happy Blogoversary To Me

Today is the one-year anniversary of this blog! Bust out the champagne!

Oh. It's 6 am. Well. Coffee will do. Slip a little something in it, if you must.

Here’s a Blooming Year One redux.

First post: Popcorn

Blog Inspiration: Late Bloomers

Hero's Challenge, Act I: Consult

Foreshadowing: Free the French Fries

Plot Twist: Plot Twist

Hero's Challenge, Act II: A Bloodcurdling Halloween Horror Story

Audience favorites:

The Lost Weekend

We’re Going to Potty Like It’s 2009

The Farm Share Blues

Torn Between Two Lovers

The Perspective Express

Roots and Flowers

Post That Best Describes My Glamorous Life: Baby You’re a Star

Post I Should Reread When I Get Bat-Shit Crazy: Onward Intrepid Writer

Blog words written: 31, 400

Visitors: 2533

Personal Take-Home: It’s been one heck of a year

Hero's Challenges, Act III: to come

With that, I’m out for ten days. Santa delivered (Santa Brings The Heat)—I board a plane for Hawaii tomorrow.

PS We’re dropping Chester off on the way. I'll take pictures.

PPS It might be time to change my bio blurb to the left. Book burning? What book burning?






Aloha!

How Many Words in Your Pocket?

Today at Blooming Eventually our subject is Ray Bradbury’s Writing Theory. Write three million words, he proclaims, and you automatically achieve mastery of the craft.

What does that look like? Let’s see if we can take a stab at how many words I have written.

Where to begin: Does school writing count? Let’s say that it doesn’t. We’ll start with writing I did just for me. So…a few essays in college at 1500 words each, many more in the decade after college; that brings us to maybe 50,000.

Next: the nine years I’ve written professionally, during which there have been another many essays for myself and for publication as well as a several hundred magazine and newspaper articles. We’ll say another 50,000 for essays and 400,000 for articles.

Do you think e-mail counts? Probably not: Even for freaks like me who are compelled to edit even the most innocuous email before sending. All of those angsty teenaged diaries? Who knows. Blogging? Probably counts, but I am fairly new at it: we’ll give me 15,000 words. Newsletters, annual reports, brochures, exhibit copy, web copy, ugh, blah, blah: 50,000.

Then there is that book I wrote. And rewrote. And rewrote. We’ll give it a probably-underestimated 100,000.

That’s it? My grand total life words tally comes to 665,000 words. Wow. Maybe I should have counted the diaries.

But that kind of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? I’ve been writing professionally for nine years and still am not even close to three million.

I’ll admit I could have employed more focus than I have. Distractions have included beach vacations, small screaming humans, The New Yorker and cream cheese yearning to be scraped out of the DVD player.

(As I write this: “Mom! Boo Boo peed in her pajamas! Mom! A spider! Mom! The head broke off my princess!).

Will I get there? Sure. Eventually. But for now, gotta go...(Mom! My goldfish got out!)