For this week’s photo challenge, I have picked the following photo which is us “between” homes again!  This is at the airport in Helsinki, Finland… Moving again to another country with only suitcases! We are still in the “between” process and will move out of our temporary hotel to our new place next week!

Not the best of photos for this week’s challenge (cell phone shot), but a true example which shows the life of an expat (in between countries)!

And now onto the Blog Hop! First off, thank you to Sandy @ Hoarder Comes Clean for picking me as a fellow blogger to participate in this blog hop (my very first one).  You can check out her blog hop post here: Sandy’s Blog Hop Post.  Sandy’s blog features wonderful before and after shots of her decluttering process at her home combined with the weekly photo challenges.  She is a true inspiration for me as I am consistently working on simplifying my life! I am so much happier with less stuff!  So here goes, the following four questions for this blog hop are about my writing process:

What am I working on/writing?

I am currently working on playing catch-up on my blog.  I am very far behind on writing about our adventures.  After a whirlwind rush to see all of the Scandinavian countries as well as Russia before we moved away from Finland, my family and I have been staying in a hotel for the past three weeks while we are getting settled into our new life in another country.  My next post will be about our trip to Stockholm, Sweden.  It was only an hour flight from Helsinki and after our weekend trip to Stockholm, we really wished that we had visited there more often since it was so close by and pretty cheap to travel there from Finland.  I believe the flight only cost 39 euros each way!  I will then work on a post about our weekend trip to St. Petersburg, Russia which we managed to squeeze in our last weekend before we moved!

How does my work/writing differ from others of its genre?

I believe my work/writing differs from others of its genre by mainly focusing on my photos to tell the story of our adventures.  I take hundreds of photos on every trip that we take.  I noticed that I really tend to spend more time at my fellow bloggers’ sites that have more photos in their posts.  I tend to be a more visual person and therefore, I really enjoy taking photos and love to share our experiences in other countries while we travel through my photos.

Why do I write what I do?

I really hope that my posts encourage others to really try to get out into the world and see as much as they can see even if it’s in their own city.  It is amazing how much you can miss out on right in your own backyard!  I think many of us get so caught up in the everyday grind.  We noticed that we were guilty of this after living in Florida for 25 years and were about to move to Finland.  We suddenly felt the need to make a Central Florida bucket list!  How did we miss out on seeing so many things while living there for so long?   It was certainly a life changing experience for us.  We now try to hit the ground running on every new adventure and really enjoy seeing so much more of the world!  We have seen more in the past two years than we saw in our entire lifetime up to that point!

How does my writing process work?

Oh boy… where do I start on this question?!? To be honest, my writing process is a complicated mess at times!  It starts off of course with me taking hundreds of photos on a trip.  I also pick up tons of brochures and magazines while we are traveling.  We tend to also not do too much planning before we travel.  Surprisingly, there are many trips that are booked only the week or a few days before we go (yes, we enjoy being spontaneous as we get older)!  I believe this has started only because we have simplified our lives in the past two years.  We don’t get as stressed and have learned to do things on the fly!  Sometimes, I can write a post pretty quickly after a trip, and others may take me weeks to get into the spirit of writing and sorting it all out before I hit publish on a post.

The part that takes me the longest is sorting through the hundreds of photos.  I first bring them into iPhoto on my MacBook Pro and write the numbers down of the photos I would like to use.  I also sort through all of the magazines and brochures so that I can correctly label the photos.  I also try to brainstorm a few words that remind me of the location and write those down.  I then decide on what links to add at the bottom of my posts which I believe would be of interest of someone who may want to visit the location.  I then go through several save drafts and then I finally hit the preview button to see how it looks and then make final changes (usually grammar) before I hit Publish!! It is always very exciting and a great sense of accomplishment once I hit that publish button!

Here are a few photos which show my writing process from my last post about our adventures in Norway:

This is a shot of my spiral notebook where I start my writing process for each of my posts.

This is a shot of what the table in our hotel room looked like while I was working on my last two posts about Norway! So as you can see, it can be a pretty complicated mess at times as I am writing a post! 🙂

Passing on the baton:

I hope you enjoyed reading about my writing process! I am very happy to pass on the baton to a fellow blogger who is very similar to myself and who’s blog I enjoy following.  Amy@ Créatrice Mondial (French for “Global Creator”), also lived in Central Florida while in college and found my blog while I lived in Finland.  She is a fellow artist and also shares my love for traveling and I know you will enjoy following along with her adventures as well! You can read her blog hop post here: Amy’s Writing Process

~Christine