December 29, 2002

Welcome to Wyndspirit Dreams! This is essay #50. I’ve done it. Some of them are pretty lame, but some of them I am proud of. Quality wasn’t the point—production was. And I proved to myself that I can make a writing commitment and keep it up. Sometimes—especially recently—they have been late, but that has been mostly due to the day I chose as the deadline. At the time I started Wyndspirit Dreams, I was working four ten-hour shifts with Sunday-Tuesday off, and I was always home and on the computer on Sunday night. Now my work schedule has changed, and a good deal of the time I am out at the farm and nowhere near a computer on Sunday night.

I did not stay true to the idea of Wyndspirit Dreams being a themeless journal of my random thoughts. Instead, I found myself writing essays about specific ideas, limiting myself to a theme of making the reader think, instead of just writing about my thoughts. There is nothing wrong with that, but it didn’t satisfy, and it’s been harder and harder for me to force myself to continue. Frankly, it stopped being fun. Then I discovered online journaling, which is the other side of the coin, intensely personal. But that’s not really what I want for this, either.

It’s been a year of changes, of finding my voice in my writing. Wyndspirit Dreams, as it has been this past year, is very much “me,” but it’s a me that is growing and changing. Over the past couple months I’ve been doing some serious soul-searching as to whether I wanted to continue it in the coming year or not. The lack of feedback on my essays did a number on my self-esteem, and I felt as though I was writing into a void, wasting my time. But I am a writer, and a writer needs a place to express herself. I sometimes do get ideas I want to express, things I want to talk about, and I need a place to put the writings that result. Because, bottom line, a writer writes for other people.

And so Wyndspirit Dreams will stay, but with changes. Some you will see immediately, and some will occur over the next month or so. I have decided to attempt to keep it weekly, to post another 50 entries (allowing for vacation time), but starting January 1, it will go up on Wednesday, which is a much better day for me right now. The essay pages will have a new look. There will be changes in web addresses and links as I work at separating the “private” and “public” aspects of my web presence. And there will be a change in the essays themselves. There will be more variety to what I post. Some will most likely be similar to what I’ve done this year, but there will also be online collaborations, open letters, maybe even a bit of poetry. To be perfectly honest, I don’t have much clearer an idea of how this year’s Wyndspirit Dreams will shape up than I did last year. All I can say is, I think it worked, and I think this will work this year.

I hope you all continue to read Wyndspirit Dreams.
 
 

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Wyndspirit Dreams