A Bee's Life: Pyramid Edition

The "Bee's Life" series has always been my favorite - these posts were so helpful to me when I was in the application process, and I just like hearing everyone's stories.  If you're thinking of applying, I highly recommend reading all of the posts in this series to see what advice other advice the blogger bees have for you!  

How did I find Weddingbee?

My account before I became a blogger goes back three years, and I think I was lurking a bit before then as well.  I know that I found the Ring Board first, while trying to learn more about specs and costs and styles of engagement rings when Sphinx and I first started discussing those.  I made my way over to blog and started following there, around the time the Fairy Tale Gen was starting up. And I've been hooked ever since!  

It meant so much to be able to carry these little guys!/Photo by Eau Claire Photographics

My application story

I read the bee for about a year before Sphinx proposed, so the idea of blogging was definitely in the back of my mind from early on in the engagement.  I had never blogged before, I don't really consider myself as much of a writer, and I didn't think I had anything new to bring to the table - so I filed the idea of blogging under "That would be cool - but it's not for me."   But as we journeyed through wedding planning, I felt the need to share my thoughts, advice, and experiences with other brides.  I started blogging about a year out from our wedding, just putting together some random posts to see if it was something I could do.  As I wrote I thought of more ideas and I worked on beefing up my blog application throughout the summer.  The guidelines state that you can apply eight months before your wedding, so that was my target.   But then I got to thinking - is that eight months from your wedding day or your wedding month? (for the record, I believe the answer is wedding day, but I was chomping at the bit to apply)  With our wedding day as the very last day in May, that was a few weeks difference!  I ended up applying in the first week of September, just so I could get my application out there into the world.  I refreshed my email like mad, stalked my blogger stats to see if there was any increase in views...nothing.  I kept posting, since the I'd read that the The Powers That Bee can monitor your posts for a while, but I was starting to think that sending my application in early had set me on the back burner.  After we passed the for-real eight-month mark, I sent an email checking if I had perhaps been lost in the shuffle...and I had been!  Mouse replied with the first of what would be many, many helpful emails to say that they would get right on checking my application...and four days later there was an acceptance email in my inbox!  
  

Why blog?
Because I like making everything tougher than it needs to be?  While that may be true, I also really enjoy passing down knowledge to those who may find themselves in a similar position to me.  And I found that information about New Orleans weddings and vendors was relatively lacking online, so I figured I should do my part to contribute what info I did have, with the hope that it might help someone else.  

A few familiar faces in NOLA: brunch with the Road Trips and fun French Quarter time with the Campfires!  

Not to mention, blogging was a great way to archive my thoughts while planning and to relive the wedding through recaps.  Sure, at one point I was so frustrated while we were assembling invitations and I thought "Wow, if all we had to do was the actual assembly, this would be a breeze!"  Making sure I got all the right pictures of all the right pieces and detailing all the steps was the hard part!  But actually going back to look through those pictures and posts to see all the effort we put into them was really cool, and I'm glad I had a reason to document that point of my life.  And it was really nice that people like MOH Curls and BM Perk who live out of town could keep up with some of our planning fun through my posts!

Why Pyramid?
I gave my reasons way back in my very first post, and I think those are still pretty solid.  He's a history buff, so the oldest and only remaining wonder of the ancient world is a pretty cool symbol for our relationship.  I'm an engineer and pyramids are a very solid geometric structure.  Plus, it's a symbol/shape that I don't mind having around the house! 

Pyramid jewelry box  from Sphinx for my last birthday.

And even though we don't watch Big Bang Theory as much anymore, we still keep up the tradition of high five-ing when they say "Pyramids!" on the theme song, which started well before I was accepted and chose my moniker.  And now that dang catchy theme song means even more to us - when we marathoned the most recent season on DVD, our puppy Riley picked up on our enthusiasm at the opening song and now gets excited and starts "dancing" with us when it comes on!  It's so precious.  I need to capture that on video sometime. 

On being a Wedding bee blogger
In a nutshell: it's a ton of work and it's a ton of fun.  Like I mentioned, writing doesn't come that naturally to me, so even a short post may have taken hours - I spent a lot of time rereading and reworking paragraphs, trying to shorten long posts, finding photos to include, hunting down the correct photo credits (which sometimes takes forever!), finding helpful links to include, etc.  And I know that's all because I'm a perfectionist who takes too long agonizing over the details, but as a result, I'm really proud of a lot of my posts because I took that time on them!  

I never got into a good habit of getting a chunk of posts done when I had free time - I'd attempt to do that on a Sunday and end up working on one post the entire day.  So besides my archives, pretty much all of my posts were finalized the night before they got published.  Which meant there were a lot of nights where I stayed up way too late finishing up a post because I wanted it to be ready to go for the morning, but I also think it made the experience richer for me.  Writing in "real time" - especially for my recaps - made me feel closer to the reader and the other bloggers on the site, if that makes sense.  Or maybe that's just what I'm telling myself to make me feel better about not managing my time well!  Sure, I wish I had been able to post more consistently sometimes, or not spend an entire evening stuck in front of my laptop on a post I thought was basically done a few days earlier, but I blogged the best way I was able to, and I made it through my recaps, and that's enough for me!

And being a bee gave me the chance to meet these fabulous gals!

So on the flip side of that - it is so rewarding and so much fun!  Writing turned out to be a fun release for me after all, my wedding-planning memories are now archived for nostalgic visits sometime in the future, and interacting with readers who comment on my posts or helping someone who has a question for me has been so fulfilling.  And meeting and making friends with some of the bloggers that I got to know by reading their own wedding posts?  That's just the icing on the cake.  And we all know how much I love icing and cake. 

How many Bees can you name?

Thanks for being my weird, internet friends turned real-life friends, ladies!

Advice for applicants* 

• The general stuff that's been said before still stands true: always include pictures.  Find your voice.  Keep a running list of topics to write about.  Write a ton.  But don't publish it all.  Bee yourself! 
• Don't think that you need to write about any topic.  One random example: plenty of bloggers write about if they're going to do a first look or not (I  did too!). It's something you think about a lot, it has a lot of potential for inspiration pictures - I get that.  But honestly...if you haven't got anything new to contribute to the conversation, it might not need its own post.  Instead, maybe you can talk about your first look in the context of your must-have photos or the timeline of your day.  Sure, every post can't be earth-shattering or revolutionary, but if you're just writing a post for the sake of writing about it, maybe you could reexamine your approach and come out with something that's a lot more interesting.  
• What's your point?  This is similar to the last bullet, but it's always the piece of advice I find myself giving out when I get asked for blog feedback from a potential bee.  Don't just write about what you're doing - write about why.  Share your thought process, your personal stories, your priorities, your lessons learned, but try to have a reason as to why you think the reader might be amused or helped or inspired by any given post.  
• Be prepared for the time commitment.   I mentioned how I dealt with it above, and hopefully you can figure out a better system than I did, but it's still a lot to take on when you're already wedding planning.  Not to mention checking into the rest of the posts on the blog every so often and leaving some feedback to other bees.  Sure, it isn't a requirement, but it's just polite if you expect others to do the same for you!  So just think hard before you apply if it's something you want to keep up with all the way until your wedding and beyond.
• Consider waiting.  I think everyone who applied at eight months will tell you - eight months is a LONG time to write.  The closer you get to the wedding, the more time you have to build up your archives, and the more topics you have to write about.  Obviously it's really exciting to be able to apply, so if you're interested you might just ignore this point altogether, but it's definitely something to think about.
• Reach out for help.  Seriously, send me - or another blogger - a message, and we'd be MORE than thrilled to read your blog and give some feedback.  I sent Panda a message after I had applied (before I realized my application was lost) to get some feedback and she was awesome.  Also share it with friends and family members to make sure your posts sound like "you" to those who actually know you.

"You're going to put this on the internet, aren't you?  Typical blogger..."

*Which I may not have always followed myself, but I am ending my tenure here on the Bee and thus am old and wise and know better by this point.