Photo Credit: PatinaLatina via Compfight cc
Sometimes it’s easier to be silence, keeping the words inside, not sharing what is really going on. But every Friday, I am invited again to let my thoughts spill out, onto the page, into the vortex of the internet. There have been many times in the last few years that I wondered if I could just give up blogging. I wasn’t making progress, at least as I defined it. I wanted making it big, signing book deals or developing a successful platform. I was just plugging away, week after week, month after month, slogging through the years and wondering what the point of it all was.
When I discovered Five Minute Friday, it provided me with two things: discipline and community.
Every Friday (technically Thursday night in my time zone), Kate Motaung posts a prompt. A single word. Then all over the world, for the next day or two, women write for five minutes about that word. Unfiltered, unedited. Then after we post, we link up and check out at least one other person’s post.
This was life changing for me, because it helped me over the hump of writers block. It also helped me to better see the larger community I was a part of.
Now I don’t write every week, but I try to. The discipline part is still hard. But if I have a hard week and I don’t manage to write and post anything else, Five Minute Friday helps me to find my center again, like following the North Star. Sometimes the prompts inspire me, other times it’s simply and exercise in trying, even if I don’t quite feel it that week. It’s a reminder that my words may touch someone that I could never expect. Together all our words, like tiny points of light, create the constellation of the Five Minute Friday Community.
This week I am so excited to announce that the Five Minute Friday book is available on Amazon.com. This project is a collection of the best that Five Minute Friday has to offer, the brave words and men and women (though if I’m honest, mostly women) pulled from blog posts and web pages and put down on paper, further expanding their reach.
All profits from the book will be divided equally between two ministries in South Africa: The Vine School in Cape Town, and The Ten Dollar Tribe! This feels especially appropriate since South Africa is the birthplace and heart home of Lisa Jo Baker and adopted home of Kate Motaung.
So please, buy the book. But also, join the chorus, and add another star to the constellation and join us for Five Minute Friday this week.
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