It’s been exactly 1 year since I started my blog….72 Posts, 9,700 views, and 57,626 words and 1 very grateful writer.  My most viewed blog was called Red Umbrella about my daughter playing Mary Poppins in a ballet show, with 1,010 views.

When I started writing stories I never did it for clicks, or likes or to sell anything.   Writing does something for me, it challenges me, it forces me to step outside my comfort zone, it makes me laugh, and it certainly makes me cry.  

I’ve written about lots of different things, from Tampons, to Survivor, to My Kids, to Car Rides, to Shitting My Pants… I didn’t start out trying to do anything with my writing.  I just started writing, like Forest Gump when he just started running.  I didn’t have an agenda or something I wanted to get done.  I just really enjoyed starting a story and getting lost in it and seeing where I came out on the other side.   Of course, lots of the stories have an ending where I am thankful or super appreciative of my people, of my tribe, which sort of became my style the more I wrote.  

But, I should not have been surprised that is where my stories would end up.  My wife’s grandmother, or Nene as most called her, has book after book in my house filled with the stories she wrote and paintings she did.  She has been gone for a few years now, but her stories will live forever.   When you read her stories you can picture her in them, you can feel the love she had pouring out of the pages.  So, it’s no surprise to me that my writing style is stolen directly from her.   When I looked back at the blog, it is very fitting that my first story was inspired by her.

“Lots of her art still hangs in my house.  But the best gift she gave to me was helping a father create a lifelong bond with his two daughters and for that I will forever be grateful.”

I never feel like a story is perfect or that I could ever write anything as poetic as Nene did.  She was the master story teller.   But, I feel honored to continue on her legacy.   

It has been a really great year for me figuring out my place in this world, trying to find my voice.

If you have read anything I have written you will know that this is the part where I try to type but the tears start to get in the way a little bit.  As a writer, if I can call myself that, I should be able to easily find the right words to put here to express my gratitude, but I’m lost… so I will steal a quote….  

“Every now and then it’s good to stop climbing and appreciate the view from right where you are” 

If you have read or shared any of my stories, I just wanted to say THANK YOU!!!  

I get so much out of the writing process I feel like I am being selfish, but I love that it might have made you laugh or cry or just maybe put a smile on your face.  Remember, pass that smile on, it looks just as good on others as it does on you.