What I Learned from … 2009

Middle Zone Musings’ groupwrite project for this month is What I Learned from … 2009. Robert Hruzek has challenged us to compile a list of our favorite, best, most popular, whatever we choose posts for each month of 2009.

Choices like this are always hard for me for a couple of reasons:

• How do you choose your favorite child? Since every post comes from my heart, choosing my favorite post is about the same as choosing my favorite child.
• I write for my own enjoyment and don’t strive for profundity or eloquence—not that I would achieve those if I did strive for them. So it’s a little presumptuous for me to say any of posts are “best.”

In spite of the difficulties, however, I’ve come up with a list of posts by month.

• January: A Thirty-Six Year Tragedy—I chose this post lamenting the tragedy of 36 years of Roe v. Wade because I am passionate about saving the lives of unborn babies, and the thought of the 50 million babies denied the right to life sickens me.
• February: What I Learned from Love—I have been so blessed with the love of my family, the love of my husband, and above all the love of God that I was delighted to share my great loves.
• March: Healing Miracles—It took a series of three posts beginning with this one to describe the many healing miracles I’ve experienced in my life. What a blessing to experience these miracles and what a blessing to share them to the glory of God.
• April: Adversity? What Adversity?—This post was another opportunity to share the blessings I have experienced in life. April posts included five of six parts of a series on memoir writing, which I hope was helpful to readers. However, sharing God’s blessings is more important to me.
• May: Lessons from Community—The thing that surprised me most about blogging was the creation of community, and this post tells what that means to me.
• June: Creating Fictional Characters—This post was the first in an eight-part series based on a course I taught. The series was popular among readers and generated a lot of comments, and a couple of the posts rank high in Google for the phrase “creating fictional characters.”
• July: What I Learned from a Blooper—I enjoyed recalling a silly blooper I made that gave me the chance to share a little about physical therapy for strokes.
• August: Mission Impossible: Book Trailer for Dream or Destiny—Joanna Young’s challenge to post something we’ve never done before motivated me to try creating a video, which I’d wanted to do for a long time. Although I was satisfied with what I did for a beginning, I have yet to go back and improve the video enough to post it anywhere else.
• September: What I Learned from Laughter—This post links to a previous entry, which I enjoyed because I don’t often write humor.
• October: Domestic Violence and You—The last in a seven-part series, this post shared ways all of us can help with the problem of domestic violence, a cause close to my heart.
• November: Advent—We get so busy during the Christmas season that it’s easy to let other activities take priority over the reason for the season. Advent helps us prepare for the coming of the Lord.
• December: Christmas Gift-Giving—Though it’s important to focus on Jesus as the reason for the season, giving gifts at Christmas is a long and cherished tradition. The best gifts are those that come from the heart.

I’ve had some wonderful authors visit my blog this past year. Each of them deserves recognition; I couldn’t choose any one of them because I couldn’t choose all of them. Some posts weren’t considered because they didn’t contain anything original from me. The freelance rates survey took a huge amount of time and energy to compile. Recognition of special days—such as World Alzheimer’s Day, I Love to Write Day, and Religious Freedom Day—and special organizations and programs—such as Operaton EBook Drop: Free Books for Deployed Soldiers and Free E-Books for Read an E-Book Week—generated many comments. However, I limited my choices to posts that reflected my opinions, beliefs, and experiences.

Only two posts during the year generated 100 or more comments: World Alzheimer’s Day (102 comments) and Comments, Spam, and Comment Spam (100 comments).

The most-visited post this year continued to be a post from 2007: How Much Will It Cost? Average Freelance Editing Rates. The most-visited post written this year was Creating Fictional Characters—Part 1: Characters Are Story People. There were several other posts from 2007 and 2008 more popular than any 2009 posts.

Rather than believing that the quality of my posts is deteriorating, I choose to believe that good posts have staying power. That’s what I learned from 2009.