Mission Accomplished

Today is Monday. It’s the official end of my summer “staycation”—and the end of my Personal Blogging Challenge.

Last Monday I made a commitment to post every day for a week. When I started this blog a year ago (hard to believe!), posting daily was something I thought would be easy to do. Man, have I learned a thing or two!

And now that I’ve accomplished last week’s mission, here are a few more things I've learned:

1) Blogging every day feels like a job. I spend a good part of each workday writing. Blogging is something I do for fun—and I want to keep it that way.
2) My posts were more spontaneous. I confess that most of my entries have been mapped out in Word and well-edited before I click “Publish Post.” The writer in me longs to create short stories. But lack of time (and not having loaded Microsoft Office on my new computer) forced me to speed things up. I kinda liked it!
3) I took my camera everywhere. I’m hooked on using pictures as illustrations, which means almost any occasion can turn into a photo op.
4) Blogging more meant journaling less. I’m not interested in spilling my guts in public—that’s what my journal is for. But it was tough to make time to do both, and I was on vacation all week! Since I’m a lifelong journal junkie, this could be the deal-breaker.
5) There was no shortage of stuff to write about. Discovering this made the project worthwhile. This entire blog is about moments of joy and amazement. And judging by the endless string of ideas that ran through my mind, my days are filled with them.

As I was writing point #4, I spent a few minutes Googling the definition of a blog. Is it possible I'm doing it all wrong? That I should toss my journal because sharing intensely personal stuff is what separates real bloggers from pretenders? I panicked when Webster’s called it “an online personal journal." But then I came across this from Jeff Jarvis, a veteran print journalist and prominent blogger: “A blog is merely a tool that lets you do anything from change the world to share your shopping list. People will use it however they wish. And it is way too soon in the invention of uses for this tool to limit it with a set definition.”

Whew! Tomorrow it’s back to pen & paper.