When I started this blog, I didn’t know about social networking, I didn’t think my blog would be a platform for my novel (since I didn’t have one finished yet), and I didn’t really know in what direction it would head.

So, five years later, what’s changed?

Unfortunately, not much.

I’m social and I’m networking…Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads, Grouply, and nings.

Is my blog my platform? That’s one of those, “if you have to ask…”   So, I’m thinking probably no.

And the direction of my blog? My navigation system can’t even locate it.  It’s consistently inconsistent.  Topics boomerang from writing to reading, from children to students, from politics to people, from cartoons to poetry, from life to death.

A few years ago, I thought I had a brilliant idea (that alone should have been cause for concern): I’d devote a different day to a different topic. It was a great system…for about two weeks.

What initiated this self-reflection was a conversation I had a few days ago with my agent Rachelle Gardner. Rachelle maintains a blog that’s been recognized for three consecutive years by Writer’s Digest as one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers. She Twitters, she attends conferences, gives online workshops, and is the wife of a firefighter and the mother of two daughters. Oh, and she agents, which means she reads queries, she reads proposals, sends out proposals, she reads manuscripts, negotiates sales and contracts, and a multitude of tasks I’m sure I not only don’t know, but don’t know about. And she has phone calls with clients. Like me, who she simultaneously walks off the ledge and helps me plan my future.

The day she called I was wallowing in the mud of “I’m writing a second book, and now the whole world will discover I’m a fraud” and extracting words from my brain with  about as much success as BP’s been extracting oil from the Gulf and our marshes.

She asked me where I saw myself as a writer in five years; where do I want to be; what do I want to be writing? I remember mumbling something about two books a year, all the while feeling  like I needed writer-brain remediation.

Fortunately, Rachelle has the patience of Job, so she walked me through a few scenarios and, ultimately, I hung up with a mission and a game plan.

Later, when my neurons actually started re-firing, it hit me that this time five years ago, I was pre-Katrina. My life changed in immeasurable ways that August, and it was only the beginning.  Many of those changes have been blessings beyond measure: my granddaughters’ births, Sarah moving to Mustard Seed, three college graduations, finishing a novel, moving back home, being represented by Rachelle, selling to Abingdon Press…

So,now I’m thinking about 2015, about the plans God has for my writing and my life, about what I need to start doing today to make tomorrow happen.

Maybe finding a direction for this blog is just one step in the dance, but a few wrong steps and you’re doing the chicken dance when you wanted to waltz.

Any ideas?