I haven’t been writing. Not really, nothing that feels very concrete or hefty. Some words here and there, and I have ideas swirling around, but I’m just not putting words down onto the page.
What I have been doing, on the other hand, is tinkering with this blog. Can we even call it ‘tinkering’? It feels more substantial than that, but to say this is an ‘overhaul’ feels too dramatic and grand. I think it’s something in-between; a change, a shift, a renewed focus.
If you receive notifications of my posts through email then I don’t know if anything will look very different. Come to think of it, if you find my posts in your wordpress reader, those may not look different, either. Would any of my followers actually notice anything different if I’d decided not to write this post?
But things are a bit different, and for what amounts to something between tinkering and an overhaul, there sure was a lot of work involved. I decided to upgrade my blog; for any of you who know anything about it, that meant migrating over to a self-hosted site and buying a domain and a design and hoping that I could transfer all of my content from the old site to the new one.
Confused yet? The details don’t really matter. I think what matters is that I’m trying something new with this, just to see what it might be like to invest just a bit more into my blog, and this blogging practice.
So to begin with, I changed the name of the site, and I’m now calling it ‘Nadine Walks’. To slap my name up on the top of this thing feels… showy and like I can’t really hide behind anything. A little scary. ‘Begin With a Single Step’ felt right for the start of all of this, it felt right for my first Camino, for the first months when I was attempting to write a book. But I feel like I’m past the beginning of things, and besides, ‘begin with a single step’ now feels a little vague.
Nadine Walks, now that pretty much tells you what you’re getting. You guys can hit me with your feedback on this name, but at this point there’s no going back. I’ll blog about some other things, but what remains at the heart of this space are the stories of my walks. And I hope to have many, many more years of walking adventures.
This isn’t a Camino blog, exactly, but one thing I’ve grown to love in these last few years has been the chance to help out others who are starting their own Camino’s. People have slowly but surely found my blog and picked up advice and information after sorting through the contents. At first I only wanted to write about my experiences but now there is part of me that- very much- wants to write about what I’ve learned. And then I want to share that information with others.
My vision is to create some pages on this blog that can direct people to this information in a clear and easy way, but there’s a lot of work left to do in that area. An even bigger vision is to write an e-book, some sort of Camino guide. This idea has been tumbling around for a year, and might tumble around a little longer until I can decide what, exactly, I want to do.
There’s a lot I want to do. I also want to keep writing my book, but why does it feel so difficult? I was on fire last winter- writing and writing and writing. I set a goal for myself and then I sat down in my chair every evening and I wrote. But now I’m finding it so difficult to get back to this book. I wonder what the point is, if I will ever want anyone to read it, if it will ever be ‘good enough’ (whatever that means).
There was too much existential-writing-crisis going on over here, so I decided to set the book-writing pressure to the side and work on this blog, instead. It’s been confusing and frustrating and hours can go by without much progress. But I’m building something new, and there’s something gratifying about that.
Now, there are a few details that I’m worried about. A couple things haven’t migrated well to this new site- a few images lost, some formatting issues. But the most worrisome is that I’m not convinced that I managed to shift all of my subscribers and followers over to the new site. So this post is something of a test. Are you reading this? Is this thing on? Do things look okay, are you able to access the new website? I suppose silence will mean that I’ve lost all of you- so if you can, please comment to let me know that you are still here. Is anything not working? Is something terribly wrong? Your feedback on this will be immeasurably helpful.
In the meantime, now that this new blog change is mostly set-up, I can get back to some of the things I’ve been avoiding (like: writing my book). And because we’re in the middle of February, it also means that soon I can start ramping up my walks and hikes. Aside from a short burst of snow earlier this week, the winter has not been a hard one. Nevertheless, I’ve mostly only been doing fast walks through my neighborhood, and I’m itching to buy a new pair of shoes and to start really breaking them in. Soon. Soon.
That’s the update but I promise, more to come soon.