A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

Happy New Year everyone!

Caitrin keeps asking me what my “New Year’s Revolutions” are going to be. I realized this is a great way to think about those “resolutions” isn’t it? Let’s change the way we do something, do something revolutionary!

I want to share one of mine with all of you. A friend put me onto Project 365. The simple task of this project is to photoblog each day of the year, for one year. That means that you will want to take one picture each day and then upload them to a blog as often as you can (you may certainly upload a week’s worth at once; the real idea is to be sure you take a daily photo).

One of the nice things about this project is that you create natural opportunities for writing: your kids may want to tag the photos with captions, for instance, or one of you may take a photo worthy of a freewrite or that might catalyze a poem. Somehow putting a camera in a child’s hands leads to a new view, to energy released, to enthusiasm for paying attention to the small things in life.

To set up a blog, I like Blogger.com. The platform is free and you can upload photos directly from your computer to your blog without having to host them at a photography platform first. Flickr.com is a great website for creating a slideshow of your photos to share with others. Simply create an account and start uploading your photos to it. You can also use Flickr.com to directly post to your blogger blog.

If all this sounds too technical, please don’t be intimidated. Perhaps the New Year’s Revolution you might like to attempt is getting familiar with some of these public Internet tools so you can expand your online horizons. Remember: teenagers can figure this stuff out. It can’t be that hard, can it?

So have fun! If you create a photoblog, feel free to send me a link. I’ll list it in the sidebar.