[Oops! Forgot to publish this one on Friday…]
Last night my favorite shop, Young Blood Gallery & Boutique, hosted an event with Meg Keene of A Practical Wedding, the blog and now the book. While I’m not a daily reader of A Practical Wedding (as I write this I have 54 unread APW posts in my Google reader… so very behind on so many things), I am a frequent one, and I was interested to go and hear her speak — and, yes, to buy her book. I figure I’ll feed my interest in weddings for the moment, and I’ll lend it and One Perfect Day out to my marrying friends in the future.
As it happened, the event had very little to do with weddings at all, beyond Meg’s initial spiel about how odd it was that this book hadn’t been written already. The rest of her remarks and the subsequent discussion were focused on female entrepreneurship. It made sense, I guess; most folks there were already married.
There was, however, one question from the crowd about submitting weddings to be featured on APW. A theme that ran throughout Meg’s response was that you shouldn’t write about your wedding with the sole purpose of landing yourself a feature on a popular blog like APW. You should write about your wedding for you, for any number of reasons: to chronicle the process; to stay organized; to recollect; to ease the transition from single to engaged to married; the list goes on. (I wish I had written down whatever Meg actually said — I’m certain it was more concise than that.)
I kept a wedding blog from about 11 months out from the big day on. It’s already been interesting to look back over what I wrote and remember what life felt like or what was going on at any given stage in the process. I’ve never been big on keeping journals, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve found myself writing about significant travels or transitions so I can recall them with some detail later. In addition to serving as a memory aid, my blog was a repository for ideas and a way to keep myself sane. (I also like to think of it as a resource for Google-happy Atlanta brides.) Some of my friends and family followed along; many did not. I never shared the link on Facebook because I didn’t want the random people I’m friends with all up in my business for the sake of more page views; It may also have been a teeny bit because I didn’t want my coworkers to get wise to the fact that I was planning my wedding and blogging about it from my desk. Ha!
The other recommendation Meg had that I really liked was to write about your wedding (for yourself) before you get the photos back from your photographer. Sift through your own memories while you wait, because, lovely and intimate as they can be, the images will only tell the story of your wedding from an observer’s creative perspective and can color what or how you remember once you’ve got a disc of photos to click through. Write down the things that stood out in your mind from the day so you can hang onto them over the years. (I’m sure it helps put the photos in context when you look back, too.) Even if you don’t fancy yourself the writing type, this seems like a worthwhile exercise. I hadn’t thought of it in these terms before, because it was something I was doing anyway.
I haven’t cracked the book yet, but I’ll be interested to see how it differs from the website. Have any of you out there read it? Thoughts?
