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Celebrating My Blog's 1st Birthday

Lilyana Page

image of cupcakes with text over top.


Happy 1st birthday, blog! It's time to get celebrating!


This isn't a long post—it's just a little something to mark my blog's first birthday.


You guys, I have succeeded in blogging weekly for an ENTIRE YEAR!


This is a big milestone for me, mainly because I have a tendency to begin big writing projects and abandon them before I am even halfway through. Blogging is a different sort of big writing project, as it is written in little pieces instead of as one cohesive book, but it is still very encouraging. It is proof that YES, I am capable of sticking with big projects!


A big part of sticking with this is the accountability I have given myself by creating an email list. I know there are people who would wonder if I and my emails simply quit appearing in their inbox with no explanation whatsoever.


My mother told me yesterday that we needed to cook three pounds of pork burger before we cooked the pasta we were having for supper. "Nooooo...!" I thought inside, "I need to work on a blog post!"


"Wait a minute—what's to stop me from blogging while I cook the meat?" The meat was semi-frozen and needed to thaw as it cooked, so I didn't have to stand at the stove the entire time. Just here and there to stir the meat and scrape off the next thawed layer.


Seeing me simultaneously cooking and blogging got my older sister Kalia thinking about all of the blog posts she's read this year (that would be a lot of them!), and wondering under what circumstances those posts were written.


There have been many different circumstances. Here are a few...


Sitting at my family's computer desk having my ankles pummeled with tennis balls.


Sitting at the kitchen table while cooking pork burger.


Sitting on the sofa trying to block out car repair videos playing on the TV.


Sitting on the porch until I got too cold (which didn't take very long! ;)


Sitting at my Grammy's kitchen island on a Monday morning (post day), trying to ignore a very busy little boy behind me (nope, not my brother.).


There are probably other odd circumstances I've written these posts under, but those five are what I am coming up with currently. As you can likely tell, life is never boring at the Page family dwelling!


I've grown so much as a writer over the past year. I'm learning how to create content quicker, and I am learning to write it better. That was the real purpose behind starting Canada Lily. I wanted to improve my writing skills, and what better way to do that than by committing to regularly blogging? On top of regularly entering writing competitions, I might add.


I'd like to say a huge thank to a few people who have really helped me over this past year of writing and blogging.


Thank you to all of my email subscribers. It's so encouraging to know that you are all interested in me and my writing. Thank you especially to those of you who regularly take time to respond. You know who you are! I love getting replies to my emails, and having a chance to hear what you think. Thank you again. I hope you'll continue to stick around.


I'd also like to say thanks to Kalia for proofreading and grammar-checking/editing some of my blog posts over the past year. I greatly appreciate it. And lest you think that you are out of a job, there will be more questions, more requests for proofreading.


Thank you to my Mom also for her help going over some of my posts as well. Sometimes I can't quite tell if what I've written is junk or not. Thanks for taking a more objective look at some of the stuff I've written. Sometimes it's easy for me to beat myself and my writing up, easy to believe the lie that I can't write, even though I know I can. That doesn't mean that everything I write is good, and I know I have things to learn, but I can write. Thank you to all who have encouraged me in this respect.


Sometime in the last week of November, I had someone come up to me and tell me that I should get Three Feet of Trouble published as a...juvenile fiction, I believe you said?... Thank you so much for saying that. I could tell that you really meant it. I don't think you knew just how encouraging those few words were to me. I have dug Three Feet of Trouble out of the digital archives and begun the process of preparing it for submission to a publisher, likely in January. Exciting, yes. Terrifying? Absolutely. But thank you so much for the push you gave me, Connie!

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