Again

For almost a decade now, I’ve been trying to do a blog…I mean do a blog consistently. It all started back when I was about to turn 30. But before I get into that, let me tell you how I got into blogs in the first place.

I was in my early to mid-20s when I first stumbled upon blogs. The first one I remember reading regularly was on a website called Ed2010.com. It’s funny because back then the year 2010 felt like it was so far off – like even the look and sound of that date seemed so futuristic even though it was only about five years away. Anyway, I was in graduate school in Atlanta, basically buying time, trying to figure out how I was going to transition from everything my normal had been to a life as a career woman. To do that, I had my heart set on moving to New York and pursuing a career in the magazine industry or media in general. In my quest to figure out how I would fulfill that goaI, I happened upon that blog.

The writer was anonymous – but purported to be a real person instead of a fictitious character, who was like a senior in college or a recent graduate – chronicling the trials of trying to secure an internship or job in New York’s competitive magazine industry. At 24, 25, I was already several years older than this writer and the blog’s target audience, but moving to New York and working for a magazine was one of my biggest dreams, so I soaked those posts up nonetheless.

The following year, after employing steely focus and unfettered determination, I made it to New York. While there, I eventually landed a temp job at the now defunct iVillage.com which had several blogs, my favorite being This Fish Needs a Bicycle. I loved that author’s writing – it just seemed so lyrical and poetic to me. Moreover, I was envious of her life: she was a young woman, just a year, I think, older than me, and she was living and working in New York (not as a temp like me, but she was actually chosen to be hired), making decent money, and getting paid to write.

Then IVillage went and decided they wanted to start a TV blog where they recapped popular shows. I was asked to contribute and I choose to recap “Survivor,” and then also “Amazing Race,” and eventually “Girlfriends.” While I liked contributing to their blog, and I infused myself into those recaps quite often, it didn’t really cross my mind to start my own blog at that time. Or more like, it wasn’t something I thought I could do. I was more focused on trying to get a job at a magazine so that I could get my own monthly column, which would springboard my TV journalism career, because who’s really paying attention to stuff people write online anyway?

In the meantime, I began to discover and read more and more blogs. No disrespect to today’s blogs, but I really loved the blogs from back in the day – back when blogs had little to no pictures, sometimes you didn’t even know what the writer looked like. It was just words upon words, upon beautiful (or not so beautiful) words, strung together to form engaging stories about whatever was going on in their lives at that time.

But there’s nothing like an approaching milestone birthday to make you reevaluate things. At 29, I was back home in California, nowhere near having the fulfilling career I thought I would have by the time I turned 30. By then, blogging had really become a thing, and there were all kinds to indulge in. I read fashion blogs, travel blogs, DIY home decorating blogs – you name it. And that’s what got me ta thinkin’ “if they could do it, maybe I could do it too.” Still, I didn’t attempt it because the whole thing just seemed quite daunting.

Then I saw that movie “Julie and Julia” where this woman named Julie Powell started a blog where she chronicled her efforts to make all 524 recipes in Julia Childs’ thick tome Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her blog ended up becoming a huge success, which I think turned into a book, and then of course a movie. I was so inspired by that movie, I finally decided to give it a try. So I went online, did some research to find out how to start a blog, and I started a blog.

I had no idea where to start, or what to talk about. All the research I did said to have a niche, be specific. Since I was turning 30, I decided to play off of Julie Powell’s theme and chronicle every day of my life while I was 30. I called the blog 365daysof30.com. I think there were some pretty good entries in that blog, but it ended up being more like 70 or 80 days of 30. I don’t remember how long it took me before I started missing days, but once I did, it was all over – I started missing weeks, and perhaps even months, until I stopped all together. When the year was over and it came time to renew the domain, I didn’t bother. Besides, I was 31 then, and nobody was really reading it anyway.

Oddly enough, even though no one read it – like no one even commented even when I ended a post with a question, making having the blog quite frustrating – when it was gone, I still missed it. And so, a year or so later I started it up again. This time without some unrealistic expectations of posting everyday (that may not be unrealistic for some, but it certainly was for me at that time) or gimmicky agenda (chronicling every day of my life at 30).

This time I called the blog Shescribe. The name just popped in my head one day and I had already been using it as my Twitter handle. I liked it because my name begins with an “S”, I’m a she, and I’m also a scribe. Even better, the domain name had not been taken, so I registered it and now it’s mine.

Then there was a matter of what to write about, and how often to write. The only problem with that was, I had to write this thing, and I’m not so into any one thing that I could write about it all the time and it would remain interesting to me. I’m interested in damn near everything.

So, if Seinfeld could have “a show about nothing,” I decided that I could have a blog about, well, everything. That’s when I came up with the tagline of sorts that “I write a little bit about a lot of shhh….” Or was it “I talk a little bit about a lot of shhh..?” In any case, that’s exactly what I did – I wrote a little bit about a lot of different shit.

My topics were all over the place, focusing heavily on pop-culture, pulling topics out of the headlines, TV, and yes, Twitter. I wrote about the talk show “The View,” and politics, and God, and being uncertain about where I’d ended up in life, and whatever the hell else was on my mind the day I felt like writing. With that blog, I pretty much only wrote when I felt like it. I did that for a good seven, eight years of inconsistent posts here and there, until I was out of a job when it was time to renew my hosting.

That’s when I began scrambling to see if I could get an introductory hosting plan for like $12. After a couple attempts to secure hosting went bust, I just decided that I would back up the blog, and then pack it up and quit. Besides, once again, nobody was reading.

The funny thing is, though, that even though no one was reading, it’s like that Anthony Hamilton song goes – sing it with me if you know it “I can’t stay away from you too long.”

Because you see the thing is, I have to write, and I want to be read, and so I’m starting it up again. This time I’m keeping the name Shescribe because I like it so much. And so the question now becomes, “What the hell am I going to write about now?” I swear answering that is probably the hardest part about doing a blog. And maybe that’s because the answer turns out to be so simple. I’ll be writing the type of blog that I would want to read – thanks, Toni Morrison.

Here’s Shescribe…again.