When I was a child, we made ritual trips over to Eastern Washington to visit family and gather fruit from the many orchards. To or from, a stop at The Alps outside of Leavenworth, Washington, was a must.

When I was a child, the A-frame building was several decades old and home to the couple from Austria or wherever they were from near there. They lived upstairs, if memory serves, and the kitchen downstairs was where they made their famous fudge, penuche, and candies.

We’d race in for candy and sweets – well, the family would. I’d run through the store down the stairs to the play area in the back right along the river.

One visit we found a bathtub full of puppies as we dashed in for sweets, potty, and playing out in the play area. The owners recognized us and allowed us into the bathroom to pet the tiny puppies not long into the world.

It was a place of light and love and fantasy.

Then it burned down. Not just once but several times, rebuilding each time within the tiny triangle of a sandbar along the river.

Over the years and the rebuilding, the children turned it into a Christian knickknack store and the chocolate became secondary to the toys and plastic angels and porcelain Jesuses.

I returned this year, a tribute visit for me reminiscing over so many decades of visits and special moments at The Alps to find it in one of its new incarnations, returning back to its candy roots.

The original founders are now passed and the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren have restored the place almost back to its original roots. The candy and food treats fill the main floor of an A-frame building, the kitchen downstairs, along with a few toys and souvenirs.

The place is sterile but welcoming, the focus on the handmade candies and goodies, which is refreshing for me to experience, taking me back to those early days. The playground area is gone, now a sanctuary or preserve for the small calm water and wetland created by the small dam downstream.

The Alps was always a touchstone place in my life, a spot I could count on to be there as I crossed the mountains of my home state. While we rarely spent more than an hour there, maybe two a year, it was a place I trusted to be there. I’m so proud of the community and the family for continuing to build and maintain The Alps for my generation and generations to come.

I was reading “I’m Over All That” by Shirley MacClaine recently and was delighted with her comment about driving down a highway and instantly being transported back to when this was just a street with homes and not a major freeway.

A blog is a place to revive old memories and preserve history, but it is also a place that may serve as a touchstone for others. The last time I changed the design on Lorelle on WordPress, the outrage and disruption came from around the world. One person told me they thought they’d gotten lost, and another person said it was like visiting an old friend after they’d gotten a dramatic hair cut. Their world felt rocked.

While I appreciated the sentiment, it was dramatic enough to delay changing the site design for many years.

Think back to a touchstone place in your life. How did it influence you? How did it change you? Is it important to keep it the same or appropriate for it to change over time?

Think of your blog as a touchstone place for others. How does it serve them? How does it help them, and influence them and their lives? When they come back, what do you think they will want to stay the same?

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
Joseph Joubert

While web writing and blogging is hard work, there is great joy.

Blogging is emotional, tapping into emotions and sharing them with the world.

If you do not connect with the emotional part of you as you blog, you are short-changing your audience, denying them a part of you.

Tap into the sentiment of the moment and remember to share your feelings as well as your experience with your audience.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Ernest Hemingway

Writing is hard work. Blogging, I think, can often be harder as it is self-published, visible to the world instantly.

Blogging requires opening a vein in many ways. It requires you to work for it. It requires you to “be there.”

It also requires you to be transparent, open, honest, and held accountable for your words.

It can mean exposing yourself, even to the point of your spirit and soul, to the world.

Are you ready for that ride?

As I wrote “Exploring the Alignment of the Planets in the Night Sky,” my mind kept going out beyond the stars I was seeing on my mobile apps and computer programs, seeing beyond Alpha Centauri to the depth of space where the Voyager space probes are making their way.

My mind turns often back through history, watching humans repeat behaviors and decisions throughout history in the micro and the macro, and my head whips around equally to consider the future. That future must project out into space. It must. We are adventurous spirits. We must explore. We must learn. That is in our nature and what brought us out of the trees.

While I want that future now, I’m left with my imagination and the imagination of others in books and blogs, creative spirits who reach their minds out past the self-imposed barriers and fuss over the endangerment to human life to risk their lives in space just because it is there.

As you blog, push your mind beyond your own limitations. What lies ahead in your future? Is it a journey to the stars or beyond?

We all live in our a universe of our own making. Define yours then push its boundaries out to explore beyond it. You never know where your path will lead when you step off the trail.

And blog it well. There is nothing better about exploring than sharing the tales of adventure.

“Proceed no further,” said the sign blocking the trail at the Painted Hills overlook in Oregon.

There are signs like this everywhere, real and metaphorical.

What was fascinating about the sign is that no fence lay beyond to block those unstopped by such signs.

It reminded me that we have signs all over the place, and many of people plow through them and many obey them without fences to reinforce the notion that this is an impassable barrier.

When it comes to your blog, there will always be fences and barriers that you should not pass, and ones that are worth plowing through.

How do you know which is which?

Barriers you should not pass are web standards and federal laws. Web standards for websites include writing policies covering copyright, disclosure, privacy, and comments, web accessibility, and the laws in your state and country on web standards and web publishing.

Other barriers include defamation, inciting violence, and other actions that break not only laws but the culture of your society.

There are conditional barriers you may or may not wish to cross. Offending readers might be one of them, or swearing could be another.

There are also barriers you may or may not wish your readers to cross. Copyright and plagiarism might be one, cussing and swearing and abusive language might be another you may not tolerate on your site.

It’s important that you define your barriers from both sides, what you put out to the public and how you allow the public to interact with you on your site. Define them clearly so everyone knows the rules.

It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.
- Ernest Hemingway

It’s the truth. You don’t have to let them know you learned how to write – and write well.

Let them think it’s all natural talent while you quietly study everything and anything you can to improve every word and phrase.

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.
- Somerset Maugham

The art of good writing is in the telling – the storytelling.

Tell tales that inspire. Tell stories that move.

Share lessons that teach.

Inspire.

Motivate.

Blog your passion.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.
Henry David Thoreau

When I moved from technical writing online to experimentation with fiction, I found I’d forgotten the words. Not all the words, descriptive words.

I forgot about the hues, fragrances, damp dew, evening colors, and azure heavens. I forgot about adjectives. I felt I’d lost them.

Keep the art of the description alive in your writing. Even in technical writing, it can add texture and depth to your content.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
- Herman Melville

To paraphrase – to produce a mighty blog, you must choose a mighty subject.

It’s time again to ask yourself why you are blogging.

Is it for the right reasons?

Does it motivate you to keep going, day after day, year after year?

If not, your theme – the topics – are not mighty enough.

If yes, keep going forth. You’re on the right track.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.
Mark Twain

This used to be true. Today, it is blog until someone offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, change topics and start fresh, improving from the lessons learned over those three years.

Keep blogging. There is room for everyone here.