What I Learn from My Blog

Most people read blogs to learn from them. But it works the other way around too: the person writing a blog learns from the process, the readers, the stats, the comments. Today, I’ll share with you some of the pearls of wisdom I’ve learned from writing this blog:

If you put “naked” in the title of a post, you get a LOT of traffic.

Writers are warm, supportive, kind, caring people.

Most everyone has a chicken experience (I mean, an experience with an actual, real, live chicken.)

WordPress frequently messes up and, in between my final check and hitting the Publish button, for reasons I don’t understand, it deletes the title of my post. The post then gets published with some randomly numbered title as if I’m a robot writing science fiction. I edit it, and the title sticks, but still there’s that moment when readers believe I’ve gone full-on metal.

People like funny.

People like heart-wrenching.

People like truth telling.

Sometimes the logistics of situating photos on a blog post take as long as writing the post.

Folks remember much more about my life than I would ever guess. I write, I move on. Later in a comment (or even more startling, in a real life encounter), someone refers to an event or opinion from a prior post, and I feel as if I really exist.

People have a warm relationship with trains. During my long promotion of TRACKING HAPPINESS, I got lots of comments on trains, and not one was negative (this is NOT an invitation to share your bad train-trip story 🙂 )

Just because they’re not commenting, doesn’t mean they’re not reading.

Thank you for being with me on this incredible blog journey—I don’t want to even go back and see how long I’ve been blogging. When I got my first agent—2008? It’s been a while. Onward and upward.