Great news!

Greetings fair readers,

Recently, I talked about how I gave up on my dream of being a writer in favor of editing because I wasn’t the best writer in my high school class. That got me to thinking… I’m grown now. I love blogging. And I’ve learned things since I was 16 about the craft of writing.

I took a look at my Word Press stats. I have more readers than I realized! And I put quite a bit of time and effort into this format. I thought: what would be a fun way to up my blogging profile? I formed a plan.

First, I would write a solid guest post for a blog with more traffic than mine and then I would tell a multi-part story about an adventure from my past that would appeal to the same reader base.

I approached my good friend Beth Burnett who is a legit writer (she’s published six novels of Lesbian Fiction and not only has an MFA, she teaches in an MFA program). Her blog has, I exaggerate not, 26X the number of subscribers that I do. I felt comfortable asking her to host me and I assured her there would be no hard feelings if she turned me down. But she agreed! It really spurred me on to do a good job with the post as well as my follow-up, real-life, library-hopping, cross-Atlantic posting journey.

She’s going to host my guest post at her site, Beth’s New Life, on October 21.

Meanwhile, in a few days I’ll start rolling out my posts roughly 2X a week through the end of January. I won’t be breaking in with cute pics of Scout (text me if you need an ER Scout video) and even though I’m going back to the Hermitage for a retreat in November, I won’t have a review of my experiences this year.

Instead! I’m taking what I’ve learned about writing in the past couple of years and applying it to storytelling on this blog. I haven’t gotten quite brave enough to join a writer’s circle, but I took several workshops, hired a writing coach for almost a year, spent a lot of time working on two carefully crafted pieces to sharpen my skills, read a lot of short memoir as I realized (last one to know) that that was my genre, and got published “in the real world.”

My goals in the next three and a half months are to be entertaining and engaging as I share a piece of my past with you, and also to be thoughtful about the topic of significant female friendships. This is a topic dear to my experience and my emotional life and I discovered it in romantic verse from the 17th century as a college English major. It captivated me and I literally chased a woman who had been dead for 300 years halfway around the world to explore it.

Join me! And I can’t tell you how encouraging “likes” and comments are. I welcome them!