This is just a quick note to let you know that I will still be blogging weekly, but I will be posting on Thursdays in 2015, not Wednesdays. Keep your eyes peeled for a new post tomorrow!
Continue reading...This post was first published on 4 July 2012. I still like to think of myself as a work in progress, which further validates my reason for changing the name of this blog to The Diane Lee Project late last year. When I tell people that I blog, the first thing they ask is: “What’s your blog about?”. I tell them I’m a bit like Oprah, in as much as I tackle serious issues (for example, why I am writing to a prisoner on death row) and the lighter stuff (like my guilty pleasures). I write about broken hearts and
Continue reading...I love this time of the year because the WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for The Diane Lee Project. Here’s an excerpt: A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,200 times in 2013. If it were a cable car, it would take about 53 trips to carry that many people. Click here to see the complete report. It’s pretty interesting!
Continue reading...You may or may not have noticed, but it’s been over a year since I blogged here. I haven’t been altogether silent, though. I have written about my travels, and I regularly post photos. But focusing on this blog, well, not so much. And there are a couple of reasons for this: vulnerability and hubris. And both are inextricably linked. Being a reasonably popular blogger (and by this, I mean that I don’t have a huge numbers of readers, but those who do subscribe and read tell me they enjoy it), I felt a certain sense of untouchableness (that’s not
Continue reading...This week I did something awesome. Even more awesome than coming in at #12 in the Sunday Mail’s (contentious!) list of top Adelaide tweeters last Sunday. 😉 This week I nominated my blog in the Sydney Writers’ Centre Best Australian Blogs competition. I nominated myself for a couple of reasons, namely because I get fabulous feedback from readers, both here via Comments, on Twitter and Facebook. I’m pretty sure my writing is good and my subject matter interesting – because you, dear readers, tell me it is. But I want to test myself out in the marketplace. Out in the big,
Continue reading...(will insert picture later!) Yesterday, I was lucky enough to have my guest postpublished on Sukh Pabial’s Thinking About Learning blog. Sukh is a learning and development practitioner based in the UK. I know Sukh on Twitter as @naturalgrump and I stumbled across him when I was searching for learning and development professionals and thought leaders. Sukh and I tweet each other just about every day now, sometimes about learning and development, but most times not. The other day, Sukh kindly opened up his blog to guest bloggers to write about their biggest learning in life, and I put up
Continue reading...Every blogger seems to do a wrap-up of their favourite posts at the end of each year. Far be it for me to be any different. I’m not even going to precis them for you, though. You’ll just have to read them to see why they I am rather proud of these posts. And it’s got nothing to do with popularity (although most were). It’s got everything to do with what they say, the stories they tell, the points they make. 1. How The Italian broke my heart 2. Dear me: letter to my 16 yo self 3. The lottery
Continue reading...I’m a communications professional. Just about everything I do in my job revolves around the strategic questions of: what do we want to achieve? How do we get there? And how do we know we’ve been successful? It seems only fair that I apply a goal-setting strategy to my blog for 2012. So here goes. 1. What do I want to achieve in 2012? 1.1 Grow my readers and followers by 100% I have a few hundred readers. Some subscribe via email, some follow on WordPress. Some are attracted via Twitter, a few via Facebook. I would like a few
Continue reading...This post was going to be a summary of the year on a month-by-month basis. I started writing it and thought: “Boring! No one wants to read this!”. So I rethought my approach and decided what better way to wind up 2011 than to share what I learned about blogging this year? 1. Blogs never die I hadn’t given this blog any TLC for a very long time. I threw in a few half-hearted posts over the last year or so, but never really lavished upon it the attention it so rightly deserved by blogging consistently. NaBloPoMo changed that. I
Continue reading...It’s been a prolific month for me, writing-wise. And I have NaNoWriMo and NaNoBloPoMo to thank for it. I am glad I took part, because it made me realise how much I love – and missed – writing. Being able to write is a gift, and one I intend not to take for granted again. But I also learned a few things about me as a writer during this time. Writing for myself works for me I had the opportunity to write an article for a not-for-profit during November, and while I wrote a good article and made the deadline,
Continue reading...One of the best things about NaNoWriMo and NaNoBloPoMo is that I am blogging again. I am posting something new just about every day. But blogging scares the pants off me. It’s scary to put your writing out there on such an immediate (on so many levels) and global platform. Here’s why: What if I can’t find anything to write about? I am always worried – needlessly it seems – that I’ll run out of things to say. I have readers and subscribers who expect me to write. And I expect me to write. What if I wake up one
Continue reading...I have been participating in NaNoWriMo, which, for the uninitiated, is National Novel Writing Month. Except I’m not writing a novel, I am blogging as part of NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Post Month, an offshoot of NaNoWriMo. Apparently, I am what is known as a NaNoRebel – typical! ( I had never heard of NaNo Rebel or NaNoBloPoMo until a couple of Twitter friends [whom I also know in real life] explained the concept to me, so hat tip to @ShaiCoggins and @KamTiger. These ladies have also been my blogging cheer squad, along with @danaesinclair – thank you!). A NaNoRebel prefers to concentrate on
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