What a Difference a Year Makes

This is just a short acknowledgement that I wanted to make to mark the first anniversary of this blog, one year ago today. Three hundred sixty-five days, one hundred thirty-five posts, and a little more than one hundred twenty-five thousand words later, it has become more a part of me than I could have possibly imagined.

Originally intended to merely be a repository for assorted remembrances of concerts and family anecdotes, it quickly grew into an extremely personal biography about all of the things in my life I have ever considered important or worth remembering. That particular function of this site will continue for as long as I have memories to recall and stories to tell.

I want to say thanks to all those who've stopped by to look over my shoulder and comment on the words I've written; many of whom I now consider my friends. Thank you to all the members of our wonderful Blogger community who have likewise shared a part of their lives with me through their own blogs. Thanks to you for inspiring and challenging me; for your words that caused me to roar with laughter or choke back tears. What an incredible gift this entire experience has been for us all.

I look forward to seeing how long we can make it last.

At the risk of slighting the rest, please allow me to single out one person, my good friend Queenie, who was the first to comment on my blog, in my third post on May 25, 2004. She said, “I enjoy getting to know people I will never know.”

Thank you Q, and to all of you as well, for taking the time to get to know me too.

Not dead yet...Still “Trippin’”

Ah geeze I’m a mess.
Just a note to let anyone who cares know that I'm not bummed out or sick, just busy and confused. This kind of thing seems to happen to me a lot when I get involved in a long story in which the sequence of events are vital to its impact. I knew going in there were a lot of sub-plots that I would have to work into and around, and I have to admit, just the mapping out of all these things has been almost as much effort as the crafting of the words themselves.

Also, in my personal life, I've been extremely busy at work, filling in for a vacationing co-worker while trying to do my own job at the same time. But the good news is that he's back now and this week things have started to return to normal. Also, my in-laws were staying with us for 10 days over the past two weeks and that limited my time as well. But again, things are slowing back down now so I'll be getting back into the swing again soon.

In fact, the next time I post, I'll actually be posting two and possibly three parts simultaneously (they're already written but need a lot of editing). So why haven't I posted them yet? Well, it's a matter of flow.

One of the reasons it has taken so long to get this story out is that I’m really struggling with my efforts to keep the main story flowing and the sidebars to a minimum. However the sidebar issues are vital to the story itself, and I'm learning that one of the most difficult things about writing is managing the flow of a story. And I've realized that I'm not doing a very good job of that. I'm now trying to re-arrange some of the things I've already written so as to make the events fall into place better, instead of continuing to stop the story to pursue a tangent, and then starting it back up again, which I feel I've been doing in the last few installments.

All of my stories are important to me, but this one has taken on special importance, because I've come to realize that it's not just about my marriage; for all intents and purposes, it's the autobiography of my entire adult life, and I want to do it right.

So the next time you see a new post, be sure to scroll down because there definitely will be more than one to read.

Special thanks to all of you who are still with me on this. I apologize for the frustration, but hey, I'm still new at this...

:)