Keen!

When I started blogging, one of my goals was to sharpen up my writing skills. Most of what I had been writing were psycho-educational reports, and if you've ever read one of those reports, they are extremely good sleeping pills. I apologize for those reports. They all have to be written in the same standard format. After 20 years of that, I needed to 'stretch' myself with a challenge, and blogging proved to be a great way to do that. I loved responding to prompts and reading the writing of other people and commenting.

At the beginning of 2011, I made a resolution that I would try to blog every single day. Having various websites out there that offered prompts helped, as did the A to Z Blog Challenge. Sometimes you just need a little push to get your brain going. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog post using a prompt from NaBloPoMo.com. NaBloPoMo is short for National Blog Posting Month, and to join, all you have to do is blog every day for a month. That the site provides a theme each month as well as several days of prompts, told me that these people understand how difficult creating a blog post every day can be.

Occasionally, what I write is not very interesting. Occasionally, what I write is rather boring. I am very critical of my own writing, and sometimes I just have to get up and turn off the computer because I get obsessive about editing my work. But occasionally, I think I get it right. I liked what I wrote on that day so much that I submitted it to a contest on NaBloPoMo. I wrote about the perfect reading chair, which is something that I intend to have one day. I thought that it was a good blog post, and I was proud of it.

I won the contest. It freaked me out--at first, I thought that the email telling me that I had won was spam or something! It wasn't so much that I won, I think, as it was that it was recognized. I always wonder about those people who have to choose articles or submissions for magazines, websites, and newspapers. I wonder if they have red pens, and if they circle all the mistakes or underline misspelled words several times or write comments in the margins, like a teacher. I could totally see them do that, even if they kept those comments to themselves. For those people to read what I had written was great enough, but to win their contest was just awesome.

Of course, now I have this really high bar hanging over my head. I will probably bang my head on it a few times, or maybe I will knock it loose and conk myself on the head. But that's okay--it's the journey that counts more than the destination. I remember why I loved writing in the first place, and maybe this contest is the Universe telling me that I am on the right track.