I started my first WordPress blog in January 2008. I knew almost nothing about the world of blogging. I thought if it as nothing more than an online journal, so I wrote about what was going on in my (not at all interesting) life, which was basically reading books, listening to music, and writing. The same kind of stuff I still do.
When I started thinking about taking my writing career seriously, so many articles I read talked about the importance of the Author Website. Your posts had to offer something useful to the reader. You needed a mailing list. You needed to pay for your own web hosting. You needed to learn SEO. Everything had to look professional. I worried so much about not doing things right, that I stopped blogging (though I had never really found my groove in the first place).
If you want to make money from a blog, then by all means, follow those articles’ advice. But I don’t want to treat my website like a second job. I can turn out a professional product if I put enough time into it, and I like reading the occasional heavily-researched post about the business of writing, but what I love reading and writing about, blog-wise, is the writing life. I’m interested in the kind of late-night, random thoughts that come when you’ve drunk an entire pot of coffee after dinner, even though you have to wake up before sunrise the next morning for your day job. Besides, when it comes to writing advice, what could I offer that thousands of other blogs haven’t already said in clever and informative ways?
Imagine me in yoga pants and an oversized sweater, wrapped in two blankets and with a cup of lemon ginger tea growing cold on the table beside me. Nothing business-like about it. I do not actually live in a cabin like the one in the featured photo on this post, but that’s the environment I imagine myself in when writing, even if this particular cabin does look like the site of a few grisly murders. I write to escape from the real world. So, think of this blog as the woodland cabin I’m building for myself, where you can drop in once in a while to see what I’m up to.
In the last couple of years, I’ve decided to dive into whatever I want to do, whether I’m any good at it or not. For example, I bought myself a Fender Telecaster Deluxe, even though my guitar playing skills were minimal, and I own enough sketchbooks and art supplies to last me years, even though I’ve taken only one art class since high school and spend more time daydreaming about art than I spend drawing. Blogging is just another thing that I have no real business doing but I’m doing it anyway because I want to.
I’d like to use these posts as a way to strengthen my writing voice, if nothing else. Hopefully the rest of these posts won’t be as self-conscious. I don’t want to say this is the mission statement of my blog because that sounds so official, so let me just say I’m here to have fun and entertain rather than inform.
Michelle Wicklow 