Two Years Later: No Eden Recreated, But Some Rants and Reflections Recorded

This is my 631st post, two years after I started this exercise on June 5, 2007. The beginning was sort of a joke: at the Writers' Union of Canada annual general meeting that year, I sat next to Marc Côté of Cormorant Books during a workshop on the promotional uses of the internet. We'd recently signed a contract for The Violets of Usambara (the novel which Cormorant brought out in March 2008) and we laughed about what a blog about African violets might do to sales.

As I've said here before, while I very much enjoy plants and nature, I'm no avid African violet fancier--there are three plants blooming at the moment but that's my personal best--so it was clear it would be false advertising to blog about them. The idea of writing regularly about whatever interested me appealed, however.

All these posts later, the blog has become a place to rant, to reflect and to try out things I'm working on. It probably has kept my friends and family from long conversations about things that may be of only marginal interest to them. It also has led me to virtual friendships with a number of people I would never have encountered otherwise. While the half hour or more it takes to do a post has to be snatched from the rest of life, on balance I think it's been worth it.

Thanks for stopping by to read what's on my mind!