Looking Back

Today, I’ve been looking back through two year’s worth of blog posts that I have written. Wow – I’ve written a lot!  I really surprised myself at just how much when I started gathering the content that I had written in regards to the making of my documentary, Opening Our Eyes. I’m putting together my 2nd ePub that will be a companion to my first ePub, recently published on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

My focus is centered on the “craft” and the making of the film, and I talk about everything from “the gear” I put together for our 99-day journey around the world to the distribution process for the final film. A bulk of the content has already been written with photographs ready to upload and links.  It’s just a matter of consolidating the information and presenting it in a more concise way.

Earlier in the year, I paid my dues in the learning department when I put together the first ePub.  After my experience working with a professional formatter, I quickly realized what not to do.  One big thing I learned was not to get too heavy with the images because the first generations of Kindles have only b&w displays.  I also learned not to create intricate designs in Pages because later I had to undo all the work I had done for a PDF version of the printed book.

I am amazed at how much I have written over the last few years.  It was interesting to look back through some of my blog entries, and see how I was “processing things”  at the time I was writing those posts.  I’ve never really kept a journal before, accept for a one year period in my life, between the ages of 19 and 20, when I was making my first journey around the world.

I’m really happy that I have archived these stories and records of my life, but that’s not what motivated me to first start writing. I used to wake up super early in the morning – my mind spinning with ideas and random thoughts, not allowing me to get back to sleep.  So, I would get up and I started writing down my random thoughts and I found it therapeutic.  It was like having a conversation with someone and sorting things out.

There are chunks of time in my life that I simply don’t feel like writing or that I have nothing to really say.  My mind seems to go into a dormant phase where I convalesce with other distractions – usually mindless ones. But then there are days when I just have the need to get my thoughts down on paper.  I’m grateful for those days – on days like this when I take the time to look back from where I’ve been.