For historical reasons related to the sale of books that I do not entirely understand, new books almost always release on Tuesdays. Today it is my turn. The paperback edition of Women Warriors released today and I am jazzed.

I wish I could claim that I took the way new books are released into account when I decided that my blog posts would appear on Tuesdays and Fridays.¹  But in fact, I was not looking that far ahead.  I’m not even sure that I knew that books release on Tuesdays when I started History in the Margins back in 2011.  I certainly didn’t understand the relationship between writing a blog and writing a book.

Back in August I calculated that I’ve written roughly 850 blog posts in eight years–obviously it’s been a few more since then.  At an average of 500 words per blog post, that means I’ve written the equivalent of a short book’s worth of blog posts each year.²  People sometimes ask me why I spend time and energy writing blog posts that I could spend on writing books, or articles for paying markets. (For that matter, I could spend the time on tango lessons, or a class in conversational Spanish, or reading my way through the hundreds of books on my To-Be-Read shelves.)

But the fact of the matter is that History in the Margins helped make Women Warriors possible.  It wasn’t a straight path from A to B.³ But in the course of writing all those blog posts, I exercised my writing muscles, I honed my voice,⁴ I explored ideas that interested me,⁵ and I found my people. Thanks for being along for the ride.

 

(1) Unless my schedule blows up on me. As it did last week.  And the week before.

(2)Pro tip for those of you who are writers:  Don’t ever do this kind of math about your writing life.  It will make you nuts.

(3) Nothing in my life, or in my head,  is ever a straight path from A to B.    Things tend to look more like this:

(4) Including my penchant for chatty footnotes
(5) And a few that didn’t. There is a folder labelled “Duds” in the Scrivener project that is home to History in the Margins