I love this quote: Stories are what show up on the page once you start hitting the keys. —LARRY MCMURTRY
Isn’t that the truth? Whether it’s nonfiction or fiction, the stories we decide to write about won’t happen unless we take that first step to get them written down. And when we do this it’s like we’re making our own little soup story.
I think back to the day when this website was born. I’d been told by my mom for a while to write down my thoughts and share them. It’s good for you. I didn’t believe her at the time. I mean, I wrote in my diary, like I had since I was like 9, when I felt the urge or needed to. But other than that, that was a mom thing to do. So as you can imagine I didn’t do it.
That is until my daughter died. At first I went to what I had always done. Two weeks after she died I told my husband that I needed to go to Target and pick up a new journal to write down as I needed an outlet for all my thoughts.
So this is what I did almost every night and even sometimes throughout the day. It helped me. Sometimes I even shared those thoughts with the grief counselor I had been seeing to help me through my grief.
But then one day I had tons of different thoughts swirling around. However, they were different this time. I felt the urge to get them written down. So I did. I called my husband and a couple of different people to share them. Then I had more thoughts and got those written down as well. Then I shared them on my daughter‘s CarePage. And then finally a new idea came to me. Start a blog in memory of my daughter. And here I am almost 5 years later still doing the same thing.
Yes, that would be great, Kristena. Sorry I’m late in replying, been on a tight deadline for a magazine on top of starting school.
Julia, you are fine. Thank you for coming by to read what I wrote today.