40 for 40

After taking the screen shot of my blog and having it rejected by Skillshare because it was HTML, I resorted to taking a photograph of my screen  with my camera and posting it here. I hope it works.

WHY I WRITE Mostly I write because I cannot get stopped. I began this blog to share our cross-Canada trips with family and friends, so they would know where we were and what we were doing for 6 months. I do not like to share information about myself, but these trips seemed like they were begging to be shared. Plus keeping the blog every day added a new dimension to our travels that we had not anticipated and found we enjoyed immensely. Knowing we had to write a story each evening made us look at the world differently, more carefully. We noticed more.

WHAT I WRITE ABOUT First, a trip across Canada and into the Arctic. Since then, I have blogged about our subsequent trips. Sometimes I blog about things that are happening around here that I think are interesting. My most viewed post is about a Romanian Orthodox funeral.

WHO MY AUDIENCE IS My intended audience is friends and family. Some of them read the blog. Some do not. People from all around the world also read my blog. I do not solicit their attendance, but I am delighted they dropped by.

WHAT I HOPE TO ACCOMPLISH I hope to create a permanent record for myself about our trips. So many details are quickly forgotten if you don't write it down. I hope to entertain the troops. I hope to make  people laugh.

WHAT IS THE TAKEAWAY FOR READERS I hope readers feel they spent an interesting half hour reading my blog, which is content-heavy and has lots of photographs. I hope some of them laughed out loud and decided to come back another day to see what happened next.

HOW I CAN IMPROVE MY BLOG

1. Include other activities than travel.
2. Split the travels into separate pages and create a home page. Right now it is all lumped in to one long string, because I did not know about home page and other pages. I hope there is a way in Wordpress to move posts to other pages. If not, I will have to start new pages for the next trips.
3. Post more frequently. I tend to forget all about it when we get home from a holiday. I have not posted since October.
4. Maintain my voice. Voice is really important for writers, and is elusive. You  don't know you have it until someone else points it out. I have learned that I lose my voice when I am tired or upset or bored. So when that happens, I have to set the post aside and wait until my mood improves. If time is of the essence, my husband can liven it up for me in the edit. I know I have lost my voice when I finish writing and the thing is just lying there flat on the screen when it should be sparkling and dancing.
5. One thing I am not going to do is attempt to link the blog to social media. I hate Facebook. My news feed is always full of other authors promoting their next book, and authors cross-posting blogs they have written for other authors. I tried to join Twitter twice just to see what would happen, and after setting up password etc., I was blocked. I gave up. I give up easily. So I am not going there. Hhhmmm. Sounds like I am getting tired.

ROUND TWO

I have spent all day working on this project. I think I have done three things to improve it: I opened a page called About Us, and uploaded the Why we do this part. I updated the opening photo. I added a page called Out and About, for stories that are not travel stories, they are local things we do or things that happen. I posted a new blog post under the Out and About header, as one of my goals was to post more frequently. I am pretty sure I maintained my voice, as it felt right when I was writing it.

Since one of my goals is to make people laugh, please read the Out and About and let me know if you laughed.

Here is the screen shot of the new blog page: