4th blogiversary

Four years ago today, at 4:28 a.m., I posted my first blog entry:

The Journal Begins

It’s early. All my days start early. It’s just the way I’m wired, I guess.

I am in the beginning stages of writing a new novel. This stage is always hit and miss for me. My mind scrambles to grasp what the book will actually be about. I’m trying to “get inside” my characters. I’m reading research books and trying to assimilate all the new information.

Since readers often ask what it’s like to write a book, I thought I’d try my hand at on-line journal keeping and let you have a peek inside.

So pop back every so often and see how things are going.

Here are a few items of note about “the book”:.

(1) The new novel is Book #4 in the Coming to America series from Zondervan. In this journal, I’ll refer to it as PTM…

(2) PTM is an historical romance set in 1908, featuring German immigrants who settle on a farm in eastern Idaho..

(3) The hero is Jakob. The heroine is Karola..

Today is Saturday. This morning is my bi-weekly woman’s bible study, held here in my home. I’ll probably use the afternoon for more research about wheat harvesting.

I never envisioned that I would blog about more than my w*i*p’s. I’m not sure I believed I’d still be blogging four years later or that people would make a point to visit it on a regular basis (thanks, everybody). Amazing!

A few months after I’d begun keeping my on-line journal, my blog (which has had a few different names) evolved naturally into one that incorporated my faith-life along with my writing life. Actually, this blog is more often about things of faith than writing. Here’s an entry from June 2002:

relying on His strength and not my own

Paul writes in Ephesians 3:16: “I pray that from His glorious, unlimited resources He will give you mighty inner strength through His Holy Spirit.”

That’s my desire. To tap into His glorious, unlimited resources so I can accomplish what He has for me to do. I sure can’t do it on my own. When I wrote books under my own power (during my pre-CBA career), I definitely used the talent God gave me, but I didn’t write the books He wanted me to write. Now, if I hope to use the talent for God’s purposes, I have to have His power to go with it or I am lost.

Florence Nightingale said: “Life is a hard fight, a struggle, a wrestling with the principle of evil, hand to hand, foot to foot. Every inch of the way is disputed. The night is given us to take breath and to pray, to drink deep at the fountain of power. The day, to use the strength that has been given us, to go forth to work with it till the evening.”

God doesn’t ask us to walk in our own strength. If Jesus is our Lord, we can walk in *His* strength. That’s a good reminder for me on this Saturday morning.

Since beginning my blog, I’ve made 818 entries (including this one): 369 on Diaryland between January 2002 and October 2004 and another 449 on Typepad between October 2004 and today. Of course, there are bloggers out there who post daily and frequently during the day, so those numbers don’t seem all that enormous, but it’s an average of 204.5 posts per year. Not too shabby.

So anyway, happy blogiversary to me. Thanks for joining me as I do my Write Thinking.

In the grip of His grace,
Robin