Monday Poetry Train #58

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An Haiku
by Joy Renee

Reading fast--
Frantic scrolling through
Fated text.

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So this is what I've been doing with all my spare time and not so spare time for over a week--since a week ago last Thursday when Joely Sue Burkhart announced that she would, in a matter of days, be moving her blog to a new host and that her current host would not allow her to export her WP blog so she was going to let the archive die--reading the archives from the first post forward one by one.

I've been reading Joely's blog for around a year now and been in awe of her ability to juggle a full time programming job, three small children, a husband, a household, pets, and still find a way to make her dream to publish her stories come true. I discovered her through Friday Snippets last summer not long after she had made her first novella length sale to Drollerie Press. I soon picked up that she had been chronicling her writer's journey since early in 2004 and I kept meaning to delve into her archives to follow at least some of it.

Then there was the added attraction of the stories of her three daughters scattered among the posts about writing, revising, researching and submitting to contests and agents and a variety of technology related snafus. Her storytelling talents were not reserved for her fiction endeavors. Her stories of the ups and downs of running a household have a charm that reminds me of Erma Bombeck. I had already grown to love those three girls through the last year's worth of occasional posts featuring them. But when I was finally goaded into delving into the archives by the news they were about to disappear, I was astounded to discover that all three had still be pre-school, the youngest two both in diapers, when she dedicated herself to the writer's path in 2003.

More than anything, this is what I hoped to learn from her: how she managed to make it happen. I have a better idea about that now that I've read three full years of her posts. The archives started in April of 2004 and I am now in April 2007. I never expected to make it this far as the site was slated to be switched over last week sometime and ever since Monday evening a week ago I've been anxious every time I clicked on the next link that the page wouldn't be there and I'd get an error page instead. If she's been watching her stats, she probably thinks she has a stalker.

This tendency of mine to let a distraction take me into an obsession is one of the reasons I haven't made it happen for myself. I'm fairly certain Joely would not have spent twelve days reading 1200+ pages of a single blog! Including comments--where much of the story resides in the evidence that support from friends and fellow writers who cheer and chide and chomp at the bit for the next snippet from one of her stories may be one of the essential elements for a writer's success. I keep telling myself that I should take a lesson from her dedication and self-control and close the browser now and open my own story files. But I keep clicking that next link...