# Liked: Thirty-eight - Flashing Palely in the Margins...
Thirty-eight will be a year of reminding myself that there’s still so much more I want to experience, so much I want to do. History may not have its eyes on me, but I’ve still got a lot of story left to write.
I lost this impetus for a while but now, at 48, I need to grab hold and never let go. We all have our own stories to write, they may not be grand, they may not change the world, but they are ours and only we can write them.
# Not to go on about morning pages too much but I feel that it is filling a gap in my writing. My "everywhere" notebook is largely for blog posts (it's where I wrote this) and my daily log is for structured reflection, assessing each day and putting it to bed before I retire for the night.
There was nowhere within what I was doing to just explore words, throw things at the page, write purely for the joy of writing. Morning pages is becoming that place, even though I have only just started.
The freedom to allow the words to flow, to come of their own volition, is such a release. No pressure, no anxiety over getting it right as there is no right. There are no restrictions.
I wrote during this morning's session that once I stop to think about what I am writing it starts to become contrived, I start to tell a story rather than the truth, rather than what's really inside.
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# To my surprise I noticed that someone had subscribed to the Daily Emails. I say noticed because the only way to find out was to go into the database.
I thought I'd better rectify that so have added a few of lines of code to the Subscribe template to shoot me a mail if someone subscribes or leaves.
It's amazing what you can do on phones these days!
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# I was thinking about comments and how I effectively use micro.blog as a commenting system; I receive m.b replies via webmention but they include the @mention at the start of the text.
I thought about hooking in to comment_post() to strip the @mention from the front of the comment as it is submitted but this would leave a before and after situation. Instead, I decided to achieve the same thing nondestructively by checking for it at display time. Now my comment parser checks if the comment text starts with a link from micro.blog and strips it out for display purposes.
See this post for an example.
I've often thought about this and found it to be a little jarring when viewing the comments in the context of the blog. As it's nondestructive I can always reverse the change if I find the flow of comments stop making sense but I prefer them this way.
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# If a post has replies via micro.blog it will indicate this with a link to the conversation there:
I use a few global variables to check this and set the link to that of the first comment in the conversation.
Go on about Morning Pages. Go on and on because they are an unbelievable gift we can give ourselves. I'm on my 2,066th consecutive day of doing them and this morning I really was just playing with words, thinking around about things, pretending that my three pages were a playground.
I went through a time when I worried that I wasn't "getting anywhere" with my Morning Pages but just kept going and tried to let that anxiety drop. It did. I just keep going.
Nothing in my writing or living other than my marriage and children has been more important in my life than Morning Pages. Really.