Emma's a paragon of blogging

I'm really taken with Emma's 21st birthday year blog. 

Last September on her 21st birthday, Emma challenged herself to post a picture every day for the coming year:

I love taking photos and I wanted to do something to document my 21st birthday year.  I'll probably get to October and forget about it but fingers crossed, I shall go through the whole year, uploading one photo a day.  It is going to be a tough decision to chose one picture to sum up a whole day but hopefully, it will end up being quite interesting!

She started with a charming picture of her birthday presents, and three months on she's still doing it every day.

Four things about this blog which together make it remarkable:

1. The theme, the rhythm.  It's a simple idea with a pattern, it's a steady heartbeat and you wait for the next one. 
2. The brevity.  She starts with a picture, then adds no more than one single paragraph about something that happened to her today.  She never outstays her welcome.  
3. The vivacity and positivity.  It's about what she likes, what's right with her life.  It's not what she hates. 
4. The focus.  It's all about the subject of the picture.  She doesn't wander into any other part of her day and get lost. 

I don't know who Emma is, but she sets a wonderful example.  By being so brief and only writing about one thing per post you get a much greater sense of her life than if she went into detail.  And what's more, she's got a great record of her final year at university to look back on in her old age, better than any box of unsorted pictures or rambling angst-filled diary.

I wish I had something like this; all I have of my studenthood is a few disjointed and unreliable memories that will die with me.

What's this to do with waterways, you ask?  Well I love the format, it's so readable for a boating blog - one day, one picture, one subject, one paragraph.  I stopped writing up my cruising logs because they got so long-winded they bored even me.  I mean, how many times did you want to hear of me passing through locks or filling up with water?  And in years to come, will the fact that I did so many lock/miles on each specific day really mean anything to me in my old age?   We relive our lives in flashback, not in real time.

Emma has inspired to start again, more concisely this time, allowing me to remember my boating more readily.

Update: I said 'four remarkable things', but Emma's 21st Birthday Year has a fifth, less definable virtue:  The 'voice', the individuality.  This is often something that just comes with practice, but I don't know how to teach it - or write about it.