Blogging 101: Who I Am and Why I’m Here!

 

 

Random Fact: I shaved my head in January and this is the succession of my hair growth over the past 8 months. 🙂

 

Greetings!

I have decided to embark on a newbie blogger journey. I have done several random travel blogs in the past few years but nothing that I have wanted to sustain or keep up with until now. I started this blog a few months ago and still have very few followers and views. I am doing this little blogging class to get more experience and get some feed back on how to optimize my blogging and writing in general. The first assignment for this is just a little introduction which I will now delve into. Here are some of the questions they recommended I answer so I will just go ahead and utilize those.

Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?

Because I do keep a personal journal, and sometimes after I write something I think, “Man, I sort of want to share this thought with other people.” So I guess my desire for public writing comes from a sort of craving for a community of writers and thinkers. I also have people in my life who have told me they want to read my writing and since I don’t really plan on getting published anytime soon, (doubt I could) I think blogging is a really good way to get my ideas and sometimes rants out into the world for my friends and other people to read. I also think a big part of it is wanting feedback. Even though I haven’t got a ton of feedback so far, I think that is a big part of why I am doing the blog in general. I am used to being in school and writing essays every day (I was an English major) so I am used to professors and classmates giving me feedback on my ideas and writing and so in a way I crave that.

What topics do you think you’ll write about?

I don’t really know. This is one of the things I have struggled with determining. I am a feminist and a literary critic so I have a  feeling those topics will come up a lot but I don’t really want to pin it down to one or even two things because I don’t want to get to the point where I don’t feel like I can write random posts about my social media detox or why I prefer sweating in a gym and not in a forest because they don’t fit in with the theme or category of my blog. I realize that it is probably better for a blog to have a specific topic because then it has a certain audience to aim to but that just really isn’t what I want. So I really don’t know how to deal with that that but it is something I have been thinking about quite a bit and would like people’s feedback on.

Who would you love to connect with via your blog?

Other people passionate about the same things I am. Which, is actually a LOT of things. Reading. Writing. Feminism. Gardening. Permaculture. Education. Film. Cooking. Fitness. Traveling. There are just SO many things that I care about and am interested in. I want to connect with people who care about those things too. I want to be empowered by them and I want to do the same for them in return.

If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

I want to establish a fairly large follower base. Not because I want to promote myself so that I can get to some certain place in my career or anything like that, but because I want people to hear what I am saying and thinking. Because I think I have important things to say and not in a narcissistic, selfish way but in a confident, self-assured way. I want them to tell me if they agree with my thoughts or not. I want to stimulate discussion and enable powerful realizations. I want to share the overwhelmingly confusing and complex things that come into my head. I want to form a sense of community really. Because communities do good in the world. We cannot make improvements to this world by ourselves. And ultimately, if we aren’t trying to better ourselves and better the world, what are we doing here?