I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.
December 7 – Blog find of the year. That gem of a blog you can’t believe you didn’t know about until this year.
I modified this prompt a bit to be about just one blog post, the one that started all this:
Gwen’s post is truly a gem for me, because it’s pushing me to write. I put up a post a couple of weeks ago about wanting to write more and not coming up with posts I was happy with. Along with a review of the year to find the good that was there, entering this challenge has helped me write, just write. I have topics to get me started and as I push myself to write these entries, I’m learning that each one doesn’t have to be the perfect post to have merit. I’m not saying I want to be lazy in my writing, and I’m not being that. I work on these notes for hours just to put up a few paragraphs. But I used to start writing and then junk it, or just not start at all. Now, at least I’ve put up a few entries and will keep going all month. I won’t post every day: I skipped the previous two days because I had nothing to fit the topics. But I will continue this challenge. And I’m writing publicly, too. I’m shy, and before this challenge, I never announced my posts to anyone but a couple of friends. I hadn’t even told my family about the blog, except mentioning one post to one brother. Now I tell the world (well, the world on Twitter) about these entries. That might be the norm for everyone else, but it’s a big step for me.
Something else is happening here, too; the challenge is working for me in another way. By thinking in terms of finding the good things from the past year, I find I’m relaxing and getting a little cheerier about life in general and more optimistic about the coming days.
Thanks, Gwen!
twitter
