A Year Has Passed?

Dallas, TX –

Really?

A year?

Already?

Man how time flies…

So, it’s been a whole year since I started writing this blog.

Well, technically, it’s been longer than that.

I had been thinking about doing this for several years.

Started writing a few topics, but never finishing any of them.

Trying to come up with a site name and over-all approach.

But I never made much progress toward getting anything done.

Until a year ago.

Then, everything changed…

Why?

What happened?

Well, let’s back up and look at how I was working on this, prior to last year.

See, Dore and I love to travel, to see different cultures and places, eat new and exotic foods, and generally, experience the world.

I blame National Geographic.

As a kid, I would spend hours looking at the pictures from all these exotic places.

Well, mostly the African and Amazonian places.

The tribes where the tribe members would wear little more than loincloths.

And the women were all topless.

Hey, I was too young for Playboy.

Which they didn’t have available in my elementary school library…

What can I say, I’m a guy.

Have been all my life.

Yeah, I was born this way…

So, in between looking at women’s bare breasts, there were also pictures of other places around the world.

And I wanted to go see and experience them all.

Still do.

And Dore’s felt the same.

About traveling, I doubt she feels the same about women’s breasts…

So, when she was leaving her teaching job so she would have the time available to take care of her parents as their health was declining, I sent her to a workshop on travel writing.

I felt it would give her something to do other than focus on and worry about her parents.

I wasn’t interested in writing at the time.

I had burned myself out writing technical books.

Computer programming tomes, to be exact.

Boring things, that all had tight deadlines, and never paid enough to consider leaving my day job.

So, somehow I had gotten myself on the mailing list of what is now Great Escape Publishing, and was getting all the advertisements for their travel writing workshops, along with their excursions to Paris, Greece, and other exotic locales.

But I was more interested in photography at the time.

Still am.

So, Dore spent a weekend at the workshop, and came home all excited.

And then life kicked back in.

And nothing happened.

She didn’t write anything, much less try to get anything published.

In the meantime, we went on a couple of their photography excursions, and I signed up for a couple of their photography workshops.

And finally, I went to their travel writing workshop.

And was told that I needed to be writing a blog.

Great, no problem, I’ll get right on that!

After getting home, I whipped out the start to a half-dozen or so posts.

And never did anything with them.

Why not?

Life happened.

I was trying to grab time here and there to write.

Whenever I had some free time.

And that was my mistake.

I quickly found that I either didn’t have the time, or when I found some time, I was too tired to write.

I even ponied up for their online course on blog writing.

Written by Paula Pant, the writer of the Afford Anything blog, it did a good job of covering all the stuff that’s involved.

Putting together the site, posting the entries, promoting the site, so on and so forth.

And all this information went into my head and kept bubbling around, somewhere in the back.

Until they (Great Escape Publishing and Paula Pant) put together a workshop on blogging.

In Costa Rica.

Where Dore has been wanting to go for years.

And that’s when I got serious.

I made the time.

I wanted to have at least a month or two’s worth of experience before showing up at the workshop.

See, I have been spending an hour every morning working on personal projects.

Mostly music, but also editing my photographs.

I do this right after getting up, out of bed, before I do anything else.

Well, I do let the dogs out and make coffee, but before I do anything else.

I don’t listen to the news.

I don’t check my email.

I don’t look at the stock market.

I don’t think about work.

I spend that hour focusing on one of my current projects.

So, I had the time slot, I just needed to schedule this in.

And I did.

Two days a week, I spend that hour, writing.

Well, that was my original intent.

That’s enough to get most first drafts out, one each week.

But I found I still needed some time for rewrites.

And then for editing, posting, and the technical side of things.

So, add another day on the weekend where I follow the same pattern, spending an hour or so focusing on these additional tasks that need to be taken care of.

Since I don’t normally have to go to the office, I don’t have to limit myself to an hour on the weekends.

And that gives me the time needed to focus on this blog, and to get it done.

In short, I had to make the time, schedule it in.

Otherwise, life still kept trying to keep me from finding the time to do this.

The other thing I did was stop waiting until I had everything perfect.

This has been an evolution.

This was something that I learned to do with my music long ago.

Things will never be perfect, so waiting until they are will just prevent me from releasing anything to share with others.

We had a phrase that we would use back in college.

“Good enough for Jazz.”

That’s why I intentionally leave mistakes in my music.

I don’t want it to be too perfect.

I want it to be human.

And I think that way too much popular music these days sounds like it could have been played by robots.

Or computers.

But I digress.

So, how have things turned out with this blog compared to how I envisioned they would?

When I started it, I thought I would write more about music and food than I have.

And libations, can’t forget about those.

But there’s still time to dive more into those topics.

After all, I’m just getting started.

Year two, here we come…

Featured image by James Box, used under the Creative Commons license.