My blogging goals

Daily Prompt: Goals

When you started your blog, did you set any goals? Have you achieved them? Have they changed at all?

Thanks for the great idea, Ritu!

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My Mum is much quieter now than she used to be.  She has always been a voracious reader with a wide vocabulary.  In particular she always had a suitable reply to anything she was told.  Many of these were well-known phrases or sayings.

In a changing world, the English language is changing very quickly.  New technologies need new words.  New metaphors are being coined –if you coin a phrase, do you mint a metaphor?  I decided to collect together the phrases I heard as a child, from anyone at all.  I was encouraged to do this by my grown-up daughter and had the idea of writing a book.

I hoped that my daughter would read my work-in-progress and the easiest way to make it available to her was to start a blog.

At the outset I wasn’t aware of the social networking aspects of blogging.  I was writing a book online.  I published as soon as I was fairly happy with a post, frequently editing it once or even a few times after pressing PUBLISH.  I was drawn into the social side of blogging fairly quickly and made a few blogging friends.

At first I stuck to my aims of writing about sayings and my first 35 posts were on topic.  I  realised early on how many sayings originated from the linguistic heritage of the Authorised (King James) Version of the Bible.  References began to appear in my posts.

Then I began to branch out a bit.  I wrote a topical post about Bonfire Night for November 5.  I developed an idea I had had about 30 years earlier about words ending in “th”.  To the nth degree was the result.  My fortieth post was a summary. (I am aiming to recap every forty posts.)

When I discovered the Daily Post challenges I gave myself the additional challenge of using them within the style of my blog.

Ever hopeful (which I may not have managed to link up with the challenge), Going down! and With Hindsight  and others resulted.

So I have continued with my work-in-progress and after a comment from one of my new blogging friends (beeseeker), I decided I needed two blogs – the second one would be a blog rather than a work-in-progress.

I have joined in with other bloggers, notably for the Blogging from A to Z for April Challenge and I have settled down to a regular posting regime.  Mondays, Wednesdays and sometimes Saturdays on Sue’s considered trifles and whenever I have something to say on Sue’s Trifles.

Blogging motivates me to write regularly and reading other blogs helps stimulate my ideas.