Hello! This is my first blog post in a while; one-year, six months, and five days, to be precise. I thank all of you who have stopped by to check out my website while I was away; you see, at first I got a cold or the flu in December of 2017 and by the time I was better, I had fallen out of the habit of blogging once a week that I wanted to establish. And prior to that, in April of 2017, I became involved in an educational nonprofit organization—Toastmasters International, aka Toastmasters—that focuses on communication, both public speaking and interpersonal, and leadership. I joined Toastmasters because I wanted to improve my ability to speak in public for the day when my book is published. I have to say, though, that I’ve gotten much more than that out of my time in Toastmasters. In the short time that I’ve been in Toastmasters, my life has been transformed for the better in a multitude of ways. Perhaps even more ways than the Marvel Universe, cinematic or otherwise, has alternate dimensions!
Thus, I decided to do a one-year volunteer leadership position as an Area Director, which started in July of 2018, but in actuality, started about June tenth of that year in an unofficial capacity, as myself and the other district leaders started on our journey, what with all that was required of us to get us trained and up to speed for our new adventure. (Think of it like when you start a new job, as there are certain similarities between the two in regards to this part of the process; although we get paid in claps instead of money, here in Toastmasters!)
The Area Director position was more intense and involved than I thought that it would. (Plus, I made the choice to invest all of that time and energy into being an Area Director.) Thus, I was unable to balance my responsibilities an Area Director and my intention to blog once a week and maintain my website, like I wanted to do, and anticipated being able to do; and I even put my writing on hold, as well as the self-publication of my first book, which is ironic when you think about it, given the reason that I joined Toastmasters in the first place!
This is the first post in what I’ve dubbed The Great Blog Catchup, as I have over a year’s full of blog posts to makeup, along with the current once a week blog post. (I had intended to go back and fill in the blog posts that I put up almost every week for the past year, even though they had no content in them, so that people would know that the website is still active. However, I think that the deletion of them all in order to start fresh is the way to go, which is what I did, and will, in all probability, cause less confusion as well.)
That means that my intention is to write two blog posts a month for the one-year, six months, and five days, and I will start with this one. Well, that sounds like a whole lot of fun to me! Have you ever been behind on a project and worked hard to get caught up? This could be a personal goal, or a responsibility that you had. Feel free to share your stories here. And, as this is a blog about the craft of the written word, how is your writing going?