I just got a fascinating holiday gift from my great friend and (sometimes) writing partner Troy and his wife Katie. It’s from a company called StoryWorth and the basic premise is pretty simple – at regular intervals (anywhere from once a day to once a month) they email you a question. You then answer it in as much or as little detail as you wish and email it back to them.
The subscription lasts for a year, so there can be anywhere from a dozen to literally hundreds of these “stories” you’ve answered for them. And all of these questions are open ended, tell us about your life kinds of things. At the end of it all, they take all of the stories you sent, along with pictures if you so desire, and print them up in a hardcover book. Pretty cool deal, really.
Of course, since the entire purpose of this blog is to leave some sort of mark, something that says “hey, I was here on the planet!” Then, with the arrival of the daughter, it made sense that I would use the blog to let her know stuff about me just in case I depart before she has a chance to ask questions (not that I have any plans in that direction, mind you, but being of a certain age, it’s always something to take into consideration).
So naturally, I’m going to take this opportunity to answer these questions and post them here on the blog, amidst other posts about life and what have you.
So there you go. The first question just came in so I’ll be getting to that shortly. If you want to follow along, I’ll tag them all as #Storyworth so they’re easy to find. Thanks for coming along on the journey. Have no idea what we’ll see, but it should at least be interesting.
Getting the Hang of Thursdays 
This is a cool idea (yours)!
Thanks! For everything 🙂
Hey, just a quick bit of advice on StoryWorth….for Xmas in 2018 we gave subscriptions to our parents and so early last year I did the editing/finalization/ordering of their final books. It was a BEAR to edit in the Storyworth interface, so if you are doing it yourself, I recommend doing all the editing you care to do ahead of time in Word or wherever you like to edit, and THEN email it to StoryWorth. You are probably doing that anyway before you post to the blog, but if not, thought I’d mention it. (You CAN edit pretty much everything afterwards, and even add photos later on, etc., but the more perfect the emails, the easier it might be.) One aspect that made it a bear is that you couldn’t open multiple stories at once and globally edit for particular errors/issues…I ended up downloading each entry, compiling into a giant file, then breaking back down. You will have less trouble, regardless, since they are all YOUR entries instead of someone else’s. (I had a lot of editing to do, as my father-in-law Gerry did all his entries via voice entry–so there were tons of places where I had to update the spelling of names–everywhere he talked about himself and his twin brother Gene it said Jerry and Jean!) In any case, the finished products turned out well! I look forward to reading your entries along the way, and I know you will also enjoy your finished product. All y’all are kind of inspiring; maybe I’ll do this too sometime!
Important safety tip! Thank you!!
Yeah, I’ve already noticed a few things I’m going to have to adjust for the print copy. But what a cool thing to do for your folks!! Everyone should do something like this. The stories tend to disappear and that’s a shame.
On Tue, Jan 5, 2021 at 12:22 AM Getting the Hang of Thursdays wrote:
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And you should do it! It’s a fascinating trip, thinking about things you’ve not thought about for years.
I am going thru edit-nightmare now. I wish they would spend on an improved set up, rather than all that glitzy advertising.
Seriously! I copy things in from Word and then have to go through and remove tons of extra spaces.
On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 12:00 AM Getting the Hang of Thursdays wrote:
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