Happy Anniversary Blog!!!

One year together and still going strong. We are still six years away from the dreaded ‘seven-year itch’ so nothing to worry about just yet. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Actually the one-year anniversary of the first post on this blog was January the 26^th so well over 53 weeks now. It’s been fun and something tells me the second year of this blog will fly even faster.

In the first year, nearly forty posts were added on many different topics. Sport, history, science, nostalgia, even maritime genealogy!!?…but most importantly writing. All of the little nuances and learning experiences I have encountered during the writing process have been mapped out and mentioned here. As I hone my own craft there will surely be more writing tips to be shared along the way. I don’t always do things the right way, of that there is no doubt. However, if I map my method through a blog, it will show what worked and what didn’t.

This blog is 1 year old and taking its first steps…

The blog is also an interesting vehicle in that it can inspire or invigorate a project that you are working on or conversely your project can naturally overflow into your blog posts. While 2012 will be remembered (by me) as the year of ‘The Rugby Blanket’, it also inspired me to confidently write a number of nostalgia pieces which in turn could well inspire my next work of non-fiction. The Rugby Blanket will be on paperback this year (hopefully by NZ father’s day) but more on that later.

I have a writing competition to enter and two possible entrants both are fiction but I guess I have to figure which has more appeal. The competition is with Poolbeg Publishing (a good local Irish publisher). I had a good response for a sample manuscript I sent to them a couple of years ago. It was a different book but I was told I ‘write well’, so now I want to try and show them a good story to go with the penmanship. We’ll see. Winning a deal would be cool but what Kindle and Create Space have shown me there is absolutely nothing standing in your way if you want to write a book.

What these forty posts have shown me is the tremendous variety of topics that are out there. Interestingly, I was pointed to a couple of blogs when I started out that were supposed to be good fodder for aspiring writers. They turned out to be rather disappointing. What were probably once very good blogs, had become a place to moan about losing laptops on planes, written by people who had little time or energy for inspirational posts. In that sense, blogs evolve for better or worse whether we like it or not. For an aspiring writer perhaps your posts will only hit the intended mark now and then but the practice can’t hurt.

I can’t possibly know what the next fifty entries will be like but you can be sure I won’t shy away from the left-field – or the right-field for that matter. I will also do my best to not bring politics into this blog but as a passport holder of both New Zealand and Ireland it may be hard to hold it in at times on account of who is at the helm of the respective countries.

Anyway enough of that. There is life out there and where there is life, there is a story to be written. Hopefully I’ll pick up on some of the more unusual examples and bring it right back here. Roll on 2013.