Bloggerversary

Today is an anniversary for me. I sat down at my computer on December 2, 2005, with the intention of trying my hand at writing a blog. I stumbled my way through and pressed publish.

My first posts rarely had pictures because it was hard enough to come up with the words.

I really had not made a conscious decision to write every day, but my early feedback was positive. One of my first followers was Brenda Rowley from Alphie Soup Blog from Australia. She's been kind to me through the years. She left a comment last week.

One day led to the next and I found myself writing a post every night. For the past 14 years, there has been only a few nights that I have not posted. Usually, it's because tornados come through and blow our power poles to South Carolina.

For me, the thing about writing daily helped me find my voice. Say more with fewer words.

I've written about this before, but about a year after I started blogging, my friend Dale Short had a column in the Lifestyle section of the local paper. He'd been doing the column for a while and was ready to take a break.

Approaching the editor at the paper, I pitched the idea of me writing the Sunday column. I took a few sample posts from my blog. He scanned them and said, I've had people approach me before when they wanted to write a column and they did for a few weeks but the deadlines come too quickly and I wind up with a blank spot on my page.

I told him I had a year's worth of columns already written. By the time I got home, he'd sent me an email and told me I had the spot. I've never missed a deadline.

Glancing at my Blogger statistics, I've published over 5100 posts and according to Blogger stats, I've had over 1.6 million page views.

Several months ago, I went to a writer's conference. There was a young man there at one of the roundtables who wanted to write. Several of the guest speakers there gave him good advice. My only input was to write every day. I'm not sure if he thought what I said was important, but I think the advice is sound.