Coming full circle

True enough, when you know what you are looking for, the universe will conspire to give you all the support to attain this. - Anonymous

Yes, I am still here with my Post A Week Challenge.  This is my 3rd blog post since I started, or should I say, re-started blogging again.  Breaking a 'habit' of posting here only when I am in the mood to write is one of the challenges I need to get over with.  It's not good, I know, and it doesn't align with what I want to achieve this year.  But I have memorized several 'alibis' for not writing regularly which include:

• Having a writer's block
• Too busy catching up a deadline with an ongoing project
• Too busy being depressed about something I don't remember now
• Not knowing what topic would interest visitors in this blogsite
• Having a sore throat or something (what has this got to do with writing?)
• And many other reasons my creative mind could come up with ...

I became so good in procrastinating and started to believe that these are good enough  reasons for not blogging.

And so after making a commitment to post at least two times a week, I had to come up with very strong and powerful justification for this commitment.  There were two things that came to my mind --

One of these is my desire to develop a discipline to write in the manner I am most comfortable with -- intuitive and structured.  That's not supposed to be hard, isn't it?  While this may sound a bit paradoxical, it's actually a matter of knowing what you want to write about and allowing your fingers to do the typing and the work for you.  That's the way I wrote my blogposts for the past years.  But soon I found out that this practice of "having no idea what I will be writing next and when this is going to be posted" can only work when you are brimming with so many thoughts and ideas that can feed your blog for an entire year.  It doesn't work when you are going through some 'dry spell' in your writing.  One needs to prepare for those 'dry spell' as well.

That is the kind of discipline I want to develop in writing -- being able to write even when you experience that not-so-creative feeling inside yourself.

The second one is the realization that for the past decades, I have actually been into many things.  On the professional side, I have experienced working full-time as a development worker for at least two decades and became a freelance researcher-writer-trainer-consultant for almost nine years up to now. 

My personal life is also filled with stories on single parenting or stories of how it is to live with more than ten animal companions at home (as of now we have ten pet cats and three dogs).  

But what's the point? How do I organize those topics for blogging?  What kind of message can I write in my blog?  This is the second point I want to learn, to achieve in doing this challenge.  I want to find my message.  This thought came to me after I chanced upon this article "How to Find Your Message and Stand Out."   I enjoyed reading it and used it as a guide in identifying possible topics and the kind of message or messages I can share with target readers.

Beaming with excitement, I shared this exercise with my youngest daughter who is also into blogging.  She suggested I write down these topics, with one topic written on a piece of paper, and draw out one piece everytime I need to write an article for this blog. 

I did exactly what Kim suggested.  I now have a list that I will be sharing with you in my next blog.