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A long-time blogging buddy of mine, starwarsanon, has tagged me in a #MyFirstPostRevisited blog tagging game. While she has rightly doubted I would post this because I’m busy with non-blogging things (like working full-time, trying to have a social life, and spending most of my off-time trying to get my third book ready for publishing), she happened to tag me on an afternoon when I was working on updating my blog.

So, let’s go back to the original post – January 8, 2013

Welcome to the L. Palmer Chronicles!

If you’ve traveled here from my previous blog,  Good. Wholesome. Fun., welcome, and I’m glad you made the perilous journey.

You’re in for adventure, excitement, and the nerdtastic.  Join me in my quest to become a paid and published author, navigate life’s winding roads, and understand the bizarre and fascinating isles of ‘Popular Culture’ (popular is a much more fun word if you pronounce the last syllable with a pirate’s Arrgh!).  While seriousness may creep in once and a while, I’ll do my best to make it an intriguing, fun, and often silly journey.

For those completely new, and are wondering who this L. Palmer person is:

1. Read my About page.

2. Check out the following posts from Good. Wholesome. Fun.  These are all good samples of what’s to come.

• When Life Gives You Starburst, Make A Dinosaur

• 1500 Miles, One Scoop of Ice Cream

• Doctor Who The Starter Kit

I hope you’ll stick around for the adventures that await.

What do you think?  Are you ready for so much excitement?

And, a shout out to my sister Natalie who designed the Amazing Banner at the top.

A History of the Blog

Before I started the first blog, Good, Wholesome, Fun, I knew I needed to work on building an online presence and developing myself into a professional writer. A blog seemed a good way to start. At the time, I worked part-time and my schedule was fairly flexible, giving me time to work on this.

Good, Wholesome, Fun was a good way to cut my teeth and figure out how to use the platform. However, in reading various books and online sources on marketing for authors, I knew my blog wasn’t serving my brand well. I took a step back and took a critical look at everything.

With this, I developed The L. Palmer Chronicles – which features my name prominently and has a more slick, professional look.

My followers grew from around 80 at Good, Wholesome, Fun to around 100 very quickly. Then, in February 2013, I was featured on WordPress’s blog highlight list at the time, Freshly Pressed. The post was The Marvelization of Star Wars and was discussing Disney’s plans for Lucasfilm and the Star Wars franchises. My followers (including, possibly, you) skyrocketed to several thousand and my daily views were around 80 even on days when I didn’t post.

This high lasted a long while, and I’m sure this post is sitting on many newsfeeds. I was able to build consistent content for the next 18 months or so, keeping up a high-end blog, and making many great blogging friends along the way (including, but not limited to Mike Allegra at Hey Look A Writer Fellow!, Brian Bixby at Sillyverse, Brenton Dickieson at A Pilgrim in Narnia, Lyse of Llyr, Deby Fredericks at Wyrmflight, and, again, starwarsanon.)

I miss the days of having time to explore other blogs, skipping through many okay ones to find ones I connect with. However, the most precious resource we have is time, and my time has become even more precious over the past three years.

My views on my blog have had a steady decline since August 2014, when I started the Masters in Public Administration at Brigham Young University. The next two years were incredible, opening up more opportunities and insight than I thought possible. However, my time to spend on writing became very slim.

I graduated from BYU in April 2016 and then slogged through a long and arduous job search, culminating in March when I was offered my current job. In May, I started working for The City of San Antonio’s Solid Waste Management Department.

I absolutely love my job, the people I work with, and the projects I have the opportunity to work on. However, my job leaves me with little writing energy at the end of the day. Three months in, I’m starting to get a good balance in, but it’s going to be a struggle.

When looking at my schedule, I have to make a choice: Do I update my blog this week or do I get the next chapter done for my book?

With the first two books of The Pippington Tales being released 19 months apart – The True Bride and the Shoemaker launched in June 2015 and The Lady and the Frog launched in February of this year, I’m hard at work trying to get book three – The Matchgirl and the Magician – out within the next six months (a lofty goal at this point).

I am trying to keep my blog up at least a couple times a month right now, but it’s difficult to balance among everything else I’m trying to do and as I try to grow my online presence on other channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

As for what’s on my blog – I don’t think the content has changed too much over time. I try to keep it fun, but sometimes want to share my thoughts on more serious things. This is about me as a person, about my interests and about what I think. Sometimes, I do think I should discuss Star Wars and other action movies a bit less, since, while I love spaceships, none have made their way into the Edwardian-esque fairy tale world of Pippington.

It did occur to me, though, that I needed to get my fiction voice more in the blog. This is why you’ll see a lot of posts with a short scene at the beginning making a point about the post. I find fiction usually doesn’t draw as much interest as commentary, so this is my way of sneaking a bit of fiction into more popular posts.

Thanks to everyone who’s stuck with the blog for a long time, and thanks to everyone who have gone on to check out and/or support my books. It’s been a great adventure – just as I promised in my first post – and I plan to keep it up (though, at a slower pace), for a long time.

The Blog Hop

I’ve got a couple other posts I want to get up tonight in preparation for an upcoming event, so I’m not going to tag anyone at the moment. However, I invite other bloggers to reflect on how their blog started and see how it’s changed over time. If you want to join, here are the rules.

 

The Rules for the #MyFirstPostRevisited Blog Hop

1. No cheating. You must highlight your first post. Not your second post, not one you love… the first post only.
2. Link back to the person who tagged you (thank them if you feel like it or, if not, curse them with a plague of ladybugs).
3. Cut and paste your old post into a new post or reblog your own bad self. (Either way is fine, but NO editing.)
4. Put the hashtag #MyFirstPostRevisited in your title.
5. Tag five (5) other bloggers to take up this challenge.
6. Notify your tags in the comment section of their blog (don’t just hope they notice a pingback somewhere in their spam).
7. Include “the rules” in your post.

Readers

• How long have you been following the L. Palmer Chronicles?
• Do you have a favorite topic or post from the blog?
• What makes you decide to follow a blog?
• Are you more excited about Star Trek: Discovery or Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (AKA The Tale of Grumpy Old Luke)?

Wait, there I go talking about spaceships again…