I love blogging!

I started my blog as a business aide. My web designer told me I should have a blog linked to my site to encourage the search engines to find me. I'm not normally terribly fond of spiders but I can handle virtual ones who crawl over my sites picking up relevant terminology.

So I started blogging. I wrote my profile and I started to write a couple of articles about hypnotherapy. And then slowly, as I continued to write, a proliferation of thoughts and emotions started to take over my waking hours. Sometimes about things I saw in the headlines. Perhaps about a book I was reading or a film I had watched. Often about events that had happened in my past.

I would be sitting on a bus and a title would come to me, quickly followed by prose that I felt compelled to write down there and then.

Or I would wake at three in the morning and have to write down the words that were swirling around my head.

I took to carrying a notebook and pen at all times. And I soon found myself writing about things that were pretty personal, which, surprisingly enough, proved to be the most satisfying and cathartic articles to write. Are they a bit too personal at times? You tell me. But once my friends started taking me aside and telling me how a particular blog had uplifted them or changed their thinking that day, I decided to carry on weaving my personal experiences into my stories.

I now have a notebook full of ideas for blog articles. Some of them are only titles, some are quotes I've heard, many are notes jotted down at random.

For a long time I have harboured the desire to write a book. One day I may well look back and see that blogging was my apprenticeship to becoming an author.

For now, I'm off to the cafe in downtown Edinburgh where J K Rowling used to write her books (actually I hear she has now moved on to the OneSpa at the Balmoral Hotel, but the cakes are better in the caf and the sauna would only make my paper soggy!)