Hello world!

Only 5 years from blog title to first post. I’m on a roll.

Sometimes you have an idea about something but it takes time, in this case about five years’ worth, to have that idea meld into something that you think, or hope anyway, might actually be a worthwhile endeavor.

What happened with me was that about five years ago, after several friends of mine had started blogging, I thought, well, maybe I should, too. After all, I thought of myself – sort of – as a writer. I’d written stories and journals all my life, I’d written and published a novel (by the way, does someone have to say self-published?). I noticed that many blogs had catchy names so I put my thinking cap on … and on … and couldn’t come up with a blog title. Then it hit me out of the blue – love and other paragraphs. Okay, I thought, not bad, I better grab that one before it’s gone.

 Maybe I should have asked myself what I wanted to write about first.

 Yep, that would have been a good idea. Love? Well, sure, I knew about love. I grew up with parents and siblings I loved and who loved me. I’d fallen in love and married (twice as it turned out) and I certainly knew the love of a mother for her children. But writing about love like I was some sort of authority? Hmm, is there such a thing? An authority on love? I guess so, but certainly not me. And what about those paragraphs? Love and other paragraphs? Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure I had picked the best title for my blog. But, more to the point, I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to write about. Hence, the five years.

 Maybe just as well because in those five years my life changed quite a bit which opened me up to new ways of thinking and learning. I’ll try to sum it up:

1.  Recession hits our dental practice hard.
2. Husband sells practice and retires.
3. Wife (that’s me!) needs to find new source of income because of 1 and 2.
4. Wife boldly goes where she’s never gone before: to a self-made, well-respected businessman (who happened to have been a patient of the dental practice) and convinces him that she can help him write his autobiography.
5. Businessman is excited and says on telephone, “Let’s do it!”
6. During first official meeting, wife (that’s me again) is so terrified she can hardly take notes and for the next week is positively panic-stricken.

Let me say from personal experience, fear can be an excellent motivator and vehicle for growth. Once I got this gentleman’s commitment to the project, there was no way I could back out of it no matter how scared I was. We’ve been at it for two years now and I can honestly say I have learned more from this project than on anything else I have ever done. Fact checking and footnoting and editing, editing, editing. I was so afraid when I started but I don’t think I’d ever be afraid like that again to attempt such a project.

 And now I think I finally know what love and other paragraphs will be a vehicle for.

In the process of ghostwriting this autobiography, I have come to realize more than ever how important the stories, anecdotes and memories of our lives are. And let’s face it, we can’t all be celebrities or politicians who have biographers clamoring to write about our glamorous lives. But that doesn’t mean we don’t all have stories to tell. Probably some pretty good ones at that. And I would like to tell some of mine.