My Mom’s favourite story is that I wanted to be an author before I could write. Apparently I would bring her a marker/crayon/whatever and a piece of paper and say “Mummy write?” and I would give her some really well thought out and grammatically sound babble to write for me.

My favourite story is not that.

Why?

At this point in my life, it’s connected really haphazardly to the rest of my writing journey. Took a few creative writing classes in grade school. Then a few literary classes to fill my options in university. Tried to get published with my first complete manuscript and have the rejection letters to prove that I truly did give it a shot.

Fast forward almost ten years. I considered freelance. I looked up the process of self-publishing. I took some more courses, one about editing. Another about plot and creating a “good” story. A third about content marketing and how to sell yourself. What was one of the things that kept coming up?

Write a blog.

Now, my first reaction to writing a blog is “No, I like to read books. I like to look at books and touch them and feel them and fold their pages and get a little high off the smell of the ink and paper breaking down in old bookshops. A BLOG!? ME!? No. Yuck.

Firstly, I am not that funny. Or personable. Someone who has the social skills of a paperclip should not be running a blog. Second, what the heck am I going to write about aside from the things that I am doing in an attempt to get myself published? That isn’t going to fill the website with relatable and shareable content that I can be proud of.

The more I thought about it the more I realized that my anti-blog stance was really a fear of rejection. Getting rejected by a publishing company was one single big rejection and any writer proud of their work can site things like “Harry Potter was rejected by 12 publishers! Dr. Seuss was rejected 27 times! I’m only on rejection 8!”

A blog and freelance work though? That’s a handful of little daily rejections and I wasn’t ready to face that.

Well, it’s 2022 and everyone is tired. I myself have become so tired that any reservations I had about “What if the iNtErNeT doesn’t like me!?” have died with the last of my patience for this pandemic.

So Hello World – let’s give this a shot.