Baked Pumpkin Doughnuts

I’ve written 515 posts here (admittedly, some of them are probably drafts that never made it to the big leagues).

I won’t tell you how many visitors I’ve had here since Day 1, partially because my friend Lydia said that sharing your blog traffic on your blog is like telling everyone your bathing suit size. Since I started my blog almost three and a half years ago, it’s changed a lot.

When I was twenty-four I started writing here because I liked to write, but looking back, it was really a way to fill my boring evenings.

When I was living in New York, I didn’t have much of a social life, at my own doing.

Point in case: two months before I started my blog, a college friend had invited me to a St. Patrick’s Day Party in Hoboken and I declined.

I wanted to stay home and make a turkey meat loaf recipe I had seen in Real Simple.

Who wouldn’t want to party with me?

Initially I was awed with how many people I was meeting through blogging.

I went to the Martha Stewart Blogger Show, where I met Matt Armendariz from Matt Bites and Deb Perelman from Smitten Kitchen and when I wrote them emails to reintroduce myself and tell them I enjoyed meeting them, both responded quickly, pleasantly and enthusiastically.

A month later I visited with Kalyn, Lydia, Sarah and Cora (real writers! important bloggers!) at a Boston blogging conference.

I continued making friends on the internet, which seemed to me to be the least likely of places, but somehow it happened.

In July of the next year I came to Chicago for another blogging conference and I didn’t want to leave.

I felt like I should be living there now and it was six months before I turned that into a reality.

What I am getting, I think, is that I really like my life in Chicago: I have the kind of friends that invite you to Thanksgiving dinner before they even know what your plans are and the kind of friends who offer up their living rooms when you don’t know if you’ll be able to pay your rent next month.

I have a favorite farmer’s market, I know what the channels on my television are and I hardly ever have to text my neighbor Angie anymore when I’ve gotten myself lost on the public transit system (that used to happen…often).

What I’m getting at, I think, is that I really like my life in Chicago and I feel like I might not be here if I hadn’t started blogging.

Last month, I was vague when I said that a project I had been working on for a long time didn’t work out and since most of you could probably guess this, I was working on a book proposal.

It’s been my dream to become a published author for as long as I can remember (I wrote “novels” on my dad’s computer when I was twelve and in fourth grade, my neighbor and I wrote our own newspaper that we sold to our parents every week for $1.00. I repeat: who wouldn’t want to party with me?) Writing is what I love to do and to have a tangible, finished product of my work to hold in my hands would be immensely rewarding.

Needless to say, the day after I lost a major client in August I found out that my book proposal wasn’t accepted by any of the publishers that had been pitched (double whammy!), for a variety of reasons, none of which, thankfully, were “her writing sucks.”

This book proposal wasn’t accepted but maybe the next one will be.

Though I can’t imagine writing another behemoth proposal and having it turned down, yet again, I know I will because I have to.

And in the meantime I am going to do what a very wise person told me to do, get better at my craft.

For the longest time I thought that my blog was going to lead me to my dream: a book. Now I know that my blog has already led me somewhere really important: where I am right now.

And now it’s up to me to figure out how to get that dream.

While I work on that, I’m also going to work on making this space more me.  More about my life, more about what I am doing on a daily basis, more about what makes me interesting and what makes my story my own. This blog is no longer going to be a road to anything in particular for me, but rather a chronicle of what that journey looks like.

Before I get any more existential, let’s eat donuts.