Writing and blog changes

September 21, 2016

I've been working for the last couple weeks on a series of posts on vocation, work, and marriage. It was going to be one post, maybe two. But writing brought things to the surface that I've been wanting to publish for a long time, and I felt the time was right to work through those ideas. It's taken quite a few hours to explore all that, and quite a few words.

As one post become two and three, and four... and as I started to see the vision and structure for bringing it together I made the conscious decision to not publish my first post in the series, which has been done for almost two weeks, until the whole thing was written and edited and basically ready to go.

I love writing series of posts on a topic, it gives me the time and space to go deep. Sometimes a blog series will evolve over months. And other times like this, it's best written all at once.

And my temptation in the past has been to publish what's ready before the end is in sight or finished, just to get something up on the blog, fresh content. But I made the decision not to do that this time. I decided I wouldn't publish anything until the whole thing was written. I wanted to see where my writing journey would take me, what was actually going to be written and how best to divide that up over multiple posts.

I'm nearly done the writing now, having gone through multiple rounds of editing, link checking, etc. But now I have to run it by Damien. And I'm a little nervous about that. As it stands now, I share things about our marriage I haven't yet articulated on the blog. I am ready to share these things, but I'm not sure how Damien feels about it. So he has to read and tell me what he thinks. Depending on his feedback I may have to spend a few more days editing and adjusting what I've got.

Either way, I still have to find the right photos, upload those photos, convert my .md files to .html, and do all the other wizardry that goes into publishing a blog post.

I just wanted to give you a heads up about what I'm working on during the relative silence. And to also let you know one of these days I really do want to write more about homeschooling through high school.

I'd love to write about our experience thus far in Quebec, the restrictions and options available here and the path we've taken. I want to re-cap last year's experience with the co-op and to share more stories and practical insight on project-based learning and goal-driven curriculums (and what we do in the in-between spaces). I want to tell you about how we hosted an Education master's student here the other day as part of his research into digital technologies for homeschoolers (and all the great conversations we had around that!) and to explain Celine's unconventional path through her high school years (this is her last year of homeschool) and how I'm working to make sense of all of that to put together her transcript and portfolios.

There's so much to tell. I feel rich right now. Rich in experience and in certain areas of knowledge. Would you call that an expertise? There's always more to learn and understand, but I know some stuff and I want to share what I've learned as we've walked through these first four years of homeschooling teenagers. I trust that when the time is right I will write those posts. I'm not going anywhere.

One other thing, after many, many months of planning and strategizing, mock-ups and wire-frames, research and decision making, we are switching my blog to a new platform, moving from Drupal to Django. We've been working on this for months, but progress has been slow. This fall Damien and I have committed regular time in our schedule to working on each other's projects. I'm journaling over at Outsideways and he's working on my blog. I'm hoping the switch to the new platform, and new look, will happen before Christmas. We'll see.

I am embarrassed about the state of the blog right now. It doesn't represent my vision for my writing. My new blog will be a better online ambassador, have an updated format, and provide a more user-friendly experience for the reader (commenting that works, a kick-butt mobile experience, etc.) So that's in the works and I'm excited about it but also just plodding through the work of it.

If you want to get a little taste for where things are going you can read my updated about page. Parts of it are quite similar to old about pages but if you've been around for a while, you'll notice the changes. A new boldness in my identity, a new humility born in brokenness and struggle.

I'm excited and contented about the direction of my writing. And that's a wee bit of what I talk about in the blog series. I'll be back with that soon.

• Comments
• Subscribe to Comments