I've been a blogger for a long time. "What does that mean?" you say. "Where is all your past work?" you ask. "Shouldn't you be more famous or making money off it or something by now?" you question. And you are right to raise all those ideas.
The truth is, my blogging is scattered all over the internet. I started with livejournal back in the late '90s and I shudder to think about going back there. The angsty rantings of a college girl obsessed with guys and dreaming of a future in the creative arts. Definitely a time capsule, maybe one I'll share someday.
Eventually I "got with the times" and came over here to Blogger, where I had a "secret" blog just to bitch about things. When I realized that I wasn't so much venting in a healthy way so much as I was focusing on the negative, I blew it up and started over with the opposite intention.
You Can Fly still exists out there and I think it should. I was a very different person 5 years ago and I felt like I needed a place to remind myself about the good in life. I find it amusing that my first post there was almost exactly 5 years ago today. Something about Thanksgiving-time that makes it good for blog-starting, I guess. My posting there spanned the length of a job; I started it just after I was hired and stopped posting just after I was laid off.
Cooking With Crazy was a short-lived cooking blog. People told me I was both a good cook and a good writer and I should combine those two skills. I'm still not entirely sure why it never worked. Part of me never fully believed in it because I didn't have confidence in my cooking skills: who was I to tell people how to cook? Another factor was that I stopped having time to cook at home and therefore write about it when I started working as a professional cook. Ironic that I was increasing the skills and therefore my confidence while simultaneously eliminating any time I had to practice them and report back to the internet for my own purposes.
I consider all those blogs to be "done" now. Could I get back into my live journal? Probably. Could I just start posting again at You Can Fly? Of course. But all those blogs eventually stopped working and I think for good reason. "What makes you think you can keep it up this time?" Well, I don't necessarily know that I can. But the urge to write is still there and as long as it is, I have to keep trying.
Unlike past blogs, She's Blogging Again will not be a place of singular purpose. It is not a cooking blog, a cat blog, a Doctor Who blog, a fiction blog, a family blog, or any other single type of blog, though on any given day it could be any or all of those. It is simply A Place I Come To Share My Thoughts. Hopefully there's something in it for both reader and author. So if you're here reading this, let me know you're out there and that I'm not just shouting into the void.
By way of thanks, I'd like to dedicate this initial post to @Nerdist, who issued a challenge for his birthday that inspired me to put this idea I've been holding in my head for a month or two into the world. Thanks and happy birthday, Chris Hardwick.
