Hello, January

I have a whole bunch of things I could blog about today, but seeing as this is the first full week of 2015, I’m focusing on getting back in writing mode.

Blogging has been my foundation for the past year and a half, providing structure to my week, and putting me in writing mode on a regular basis. But I haven’t been very productive recently. I didn’t blog during my two-week trip to Japan last month, and then I was busy catching up with other things before going into end-of-December holiday mode.

Yesterday, as I was catching up with my emails, I opened the end-of-year summary that WordPress sent to let me know how my blog has been doing.

Considering I took a hiatus from blogging over the summer, and that I didn’t blog much toward the end of the year, I was pleased to see that I had 8,800 hits in 2014. That’s the equivalent – as WordPress put it – of three sold-out performances at the Sydney Opera House, which has almost 2,700 seats in its Concert Hall.

I used to think of myself as one of the “January people” – the ones who join a gym or revamp their diets at the beginning of the year. I think this year I’ll just take one day, and one blog post, at a time.

One of the writing blogs I follow (Live to Write – Write to Live, by the New Hampshire Writers’ Network) had an interesting post this morning about digital filing for writers. I’ll have to digitally file it, or – um – maybe just refer back to this post.

Hello, January! Happy (and healthy) New Year, everyone!

The book I might have written, and the book I’m actually writing

This morning, I read an interview in the Toronto Star with Eve Schaub, author of a new book called Year of No Sugar.

By coincidence, last Friday I read a blog post on the New Hampshire Writers’ Network blog (“Live to Write – Write to Live”), titled “The Book You Wish You Wrote.” My first thought was Gone with the Wind, but as soon as I saw the article today about Year of No Sugar, I wished I’d written that too.

Another coincidence – just before I saw the article, my walking partners and I were talking about sugar, and how it’s in all kinds of foods you wouldn’t expect it to be in. I’ve eliminated sugar from my diet twice – once for ten days, more recently for three weeks – and felt great both times. Would I be able to stick it out for a year? I don’t know. I do know that once I fell off the wagon, it was hard to get back on. But there have been less-drastic, positive changes in the way I eat, partly as a result of having gone cold turkey. Maybe it could have become a book.

No serious regrets, though. I’m working on my own “year of” book, and even though other people have written about their year of Kaddish and loss of a loved one, I think what I experienced the year after I lost my dad has some unique elements.

There’s another aspect to writing it too. Even though it sounds a little, um, woo-woo, the book kind of started writing itself in my head. I just wrote it down,  then added to it, to see if there actually was a book to be written. It seems there is.