For You and for Me

For the record, I like hiding song lyrics and titles in my blog writing, so feel free to begin singing when you see a title, if it strikes you.

I spent the first 2 months writing with reckless abandon. It was a purge, a way to capture all these fresh ideas and thoughts and memories that were fading away too quickly. Once that purge hit a sort of equilibrium (or maybe I just finished my reacclimitizaton to US culture) I began asking questions of myself about the book.

“Why am I writing this?” is always first. That was answered in the first 2 posts of this blog. “Who am I writing for?” immediately followed. Because if you don’t know who your audience is, then your voice gets fuzzy. If you are speaking an unintelligible language to those hearing your message, then you’ve failed. But changing the language wasn’t as hard as figuring out who I was directing my story toward.

Initially this was a journal. I keep journals on almost every journey I take, whether it’s a single overnight camping trip just up the road, or a month in Nepal. Sometimes a good day hike or trip to the mall even warrants a journal entry. I have a lot of words, I guess.

After bending several people’s ears nearly to breaking, (thanks guys!) I quit thinking I was writing this just for myself, just as a remembrance of a month of my life, and began thinking of it in terms of the people who might be affected by the story if they were to run across it. All you non-writers out there are wondering why that is such a big deal. I won’t go into it, but believe me, it is a huge shift when you are writing words for your own psyche versus spelling things out for anyone else’s. Huge paradigm shift.

So after mulling it over and getting plenty of support from people who really, honestly wanted to read it, I rewrote the purge. So now it is a better book, for you and for me.