Welcome to my first blog post. How did I get here? Well, that is a good question. Sometimes I’m not quite sure myself. I suppose that without going back to the very beginning, we could start with my first introduction to social media. My best friend from childhood pestered me to sign up for this thing called Facebook. I thought it was silly. I thought I didn’t have time for such nonsense. I was a busy mother and teacher after all, and that was what I told my friends. But her persistence wore me down. I finally signed up for a Facebook account in November of 2008 where I quickly found that I enjoyed finding my friends and family and sharing photos and events with them.
Years later, in January of 2020, I accidentally started blogging on my Facebook page. I had made three New Year’s Resolutions that year: to get 30 minutes of cardio every day, to read for 30 minutes a day, and to do 10 minutes of Yoga with Adriene on YouTube on weekday mornings. That year I decided I would post my progress on my goals daily on Facebook to keep myself accountable. Then I started doing weekly reviews where I would report lost (or gained) pounds, successes and failures, completed books and page numbers, and I would recap with a section called, “What I Learned…”.
When I started posting these daily and weekly posts in 2020, I had no idea what that year would become. By year’s end, I had a daily blow-by-blow account of the year that no one who was alive and old enough to remember at the time will ever forget. My year on Facebook included 2020 memes, recipes, cocktail recipes, and all the funny, heartbreaking, repetitive, crazy moments of being in the middle of a global pandemic. My daughter was also a senior in high school in the year 2020, and my husband and I were both middle school teachers, so we had three different virtual classrooms going on in our house. And thanks to Facebook, I got to go through all of it with my friends and family, and I have a record of every single day.
When school resumed in person in Montana in the fall of 2020, I started to think my blogging on Facebook during the pandemic would make a good story. I was teaching my students about writing stories, and I always write with them. I started making a plotline for A 2020 Story to demonstrate writing a short story. I quickly realized that my 2020 story was not a short story at all. It was a book. My New Year’s resolution in 2021 was to write my 2020 story, and that is what I did. Manuscript complete. My resolution in 2022 was to try to get my story published. I had my husband edit my story, and then I shared my manuscript with friends, wrote a query letter, and started querying agents. Long story short (but not really), I got some feedback that I could potentially have a shot at a traditional publisher if I took some time to build my platform.
So, that’s how I got here. While I was a person who thought she didn’t have time for Facebook, my best friend knew better about me, and for some reason, I feel compelled to share my work with a wider audience. To me, it is all about learning more and more every day. Many friends have shared with me that some little thing I posted on Facebook helped them in some way, and that is why I keep doing it. Writing is something that helps me, and if it helps others too, then those are two very good reasons to keep writing and sharing it with others.
That is why I say, “Come on in.” This whole idea is outside of my comfort zone, but what I have learned has led me to this place right now, and I’m excited to keep learning. Thank you so much for coming along. I am so happy to have you here.
