Reboot

When I was young, I wanted nothing more than to be a writer. I was always holed up in my bedroom, working on a story. More often than not, these stories were glorified fan fiction (ah, the amount of time I spent devising creative ways for the characters from Hey Dude to come hang out with the gals from the Babysitters Club), but they still gave me a creative outlet.

I went to school to be a journalist, which was not exactly the wisest move in the early 2000s. I pretty easily became an editor and at least worked with writing, even though I was not actually writing myself. A few years after being an assistant editor at a textbook company, I landed a marketing job where I got to write. I was in my mid-twenties, and professionally, those were some of my best years. Sure, the company produced glorified junk mail, but looking back, I really enjoyed doing that work, and wrote some pretty great articles. I made my next career move based on a variety of factors, many of them quite practical, but I miss writing those articles a whole lot.

I thought I’d be a novelist, or a journalist, or a ... something. But then I realized that while I’m a competent writer, I’m not a great one. I was perfectly suited for writing short marketing pieces, and helping spiff up an author’s bad writing, but not really good enough to publish something on my own. And I feel like I might have missed the boat on this blogging thing. There are people making oodles of money blogging about really fun subjects - their kids, or remodeling their houses, or trying out new recipes. But the blogging market is pretty saturated right now, and I just don’t have the resources to figure out how to take fantastic DSLR photos and photoshop on pithy sayings that will get them pinned and drive traffic back to my website. I don’t know much about SEO or keywords.

But here I am. I kept this housing blog for about 2 years from 2010 to 2011. I gained a few readers, and there’s even one of my DIY projects on Pinterest! But when I took my current job, my practical, stable job, I kind of felt the wind come out of my sails creatively, and I stopped blogging. Even though I actually had a lot of experiences with my house that would have been great blog fodder! There was my failed attempt at community gardening, a couple of room re-dos, and the angst over bringing home another baby to a tiny, two bedroom condo.

I feel the twinge to start over again, and so I am going to. I’m not sure what direction of this blog will take. I’m going to keep the core focus my home, as I think I have a somewhat unique perspective there (trying to raise a family in a small house, making the best of being underwater on our mortgage), but branch out to be a little more “lifestyle” (even though that category makes me twitch a little). I would like to explore simple living on a larger level, such as my feelings about working and parenting, schedules, consumerism, etc., family life, such as raising our two boys, my husband making the shift to be a stay at home dad, and probably some other random topics as well.

So, here we go! I hope you will join me on this new adventure of mine.