I want to thank everyone who has visited my site and read my blogs. It sometimes surprises me how many people read them. There have been 38,430 views. I received a notification that it was my anniversary on WordPress. I started my blog three years ago. I wasn’t very good at it then, but I learn.
My most popular post, by far, is one of my very first, “‘Bones,’ Cancer and Real Life.” It has received 25,571 views. At the time I watched my first “Bones” episode—season 9, episode 13, “Big in the Philippines,” which was directed by David Boreanaz, who also plays a lead in the series—in January of 2014, I was just coming out of my grief over my husband’s death in September of 2012. I remember feeling like the sun had finally come out after more than a year in the rain. Even though I knew nothing about “Bones” or the characters, I was pulled deeply into the story. I gasped. I talked back to the characters (I’m weird, that way). I cried—a lot. I wrote the blog two months later, after I binged on the series and experienced it sequentially, with all the richness a decade of character development can bring to a story. I was moved in different ways.
Even though most of my blogs are related to celebrities and celebrity events—Echoes of Hope‘s annual celebrity hockey game being among them—I have also gotten fairly strong responses to some of my blogs about local history and events. For example, “Randy Lewis Talks about the Occupation of Fort Lawton” has received nearly 300 views. For this one, I drove up to Everett (half an hour north of Seattle) to interview Randy Lewis, Colville, one of the Elders at United Indians of All Tribes Foundation (UIATF). I like interviewing people and taking their photos. And, I like sharing it with others.
During the last year, I began writing about current events, many of which were about the violence in our society—”A Culture of Violence,” “Forty-nine New Names,” “How Many Gun Deaths Are Acceptable,” “Remember Them,” and “Dakota Access Pipeline Protest Turns Violent.” These stories felt too important not to write. I shared my deepest feelings, about my continuing grief and healing process over the loss of my husband, in a post, “Four Years Gone“—not the first time I’ve written about him; my concerns for America in “Thoughts on a Polarized America” and “The Beginning of the End for the EPA?;” things I find interesting, such as “My First Biography, or The Importance of Reading as a Child“—which is about my childhood hero, Harriet Tubman—and a few indie film blogs, like “Don’t Miss Jack Goes Home” and “‘Last Days of Summer’ Premieres at Rhode Island International Film Festival,” which involved two of my favorite actors, Thomas Dekker (who wrote and directed “Jack Goes Home”) and Michael Rosenbaum (who acted in “Last Days of Summer”). I even posted two of my own short stories, “The Boy with the Broken Zipper,” which is based on a real boy I met who was living on the streets, and “Once There Were Men,”which is dystopian SciFi.
I don’t publish nearly enough here, but that’s partly because I maintain two other blogs—one for my business, Who’s Giving, and another for my books, The Wolf Dream Books. I also maintain three Twitter accounts @RamonaRidgewell, @WhosGiving and @TheWolfDreams, as well as my personal Facebook account, and Facebook pages for my company (Who’s Giving) and my books (The Wolf Dream Books). It’s been a lot of work handling them all, but I’m actually managing two businesses, so I don’t how else to set it up.
The most amazing thing I’ve learned in the last three years is, once you start writing, there is no stopping it. It’s like an addiction I need to manage so it doesn’t interfere too much with the things I’m supposed to be doing. I’m not planning to stop any time soon.
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