Post of Posts

Hey friends!

Our journey around the world has nearly come full circle and now we turn our steps homeward. If you’re following along in posts you might be surprised since the previous post put us in Vietnam. But to travel, live, and write every day is a tall order and we long ago accepted the blog would always lag behind our footsteps. Now that we’re headed home to new lives, time to add to this blog will become scarce, but I don’t want to leave this project half-finished. So I’ve slimmed the number of remaining blog posts down to those with the most meaning to us. This isn’t easy because it means giving up perfectionism and completionism that rely on in life, the obsessions that carried me through college and my PhD. “It was all wonderful! I want to show you everything!” the voice in my headspace shouts. But time is limited and new projects beckon.

Thousands of stories, only so much time.

Since this is an illustrative example of the universal problem of ‘more thing to do than time allows’, I’m sharing my thought process below on how I chose the remaining blog posts. I keep the titles of all future posts written in a word processor document, so I went through and asked myself whether each title had a story I had to write. Did it have something that need to share with you?

Most of the posts I erased were ones meant to make the blog a complete timeline of our travels. I cleared out most of the posts detailing our transitions between cities or countries because you can figure out when we’ve gone somewhere new—we’re a travel blog. I also found a lot of posts that were simply photos of a city followed by an article about something specific in the city; I’ve combined these posts into one. And some things were just unmemorable. If I looked at the title of a post and couldn’t immediately recall what it was about, out it goes.

The post ‘to-write’ list, before and after. Double-dashes mark breaks between countries.

The end result is that I’ve more than halved the number of posts left, from 200 to around 90. I’d estimate that this will save me about 40% of my writing time because many of the posts I removed from the ‘to-write’ list were short and easy and the remaining posts are more in-depth. But they all have something I want to tell you about our travels, stories from our journey around the world.