This Is What It's About

When I first started blogging, I had no idea what I was doing.

And that is a fact. I had no agenda, no plan, no goal, no intended audience, and honestly no good reason to be doing it. Posts were a haphazard mess of whatever I happened to be thinking about at the time and the blog layout competed with the the world's worst website ever for poor design. Looking back, my fourteen-year-old logic seemed to be that I would just throw myself out there, hit the big, red button and see what happened.

You can image, then, how pleasantly surprised I was to discover a community of writers that was also out here, braving the internet with their thoughts and feelings and words. These were people like me: people who did what I did and loved what I loved. These were people that made writing social. These were people who were willing to engage in conversation about the craft and make like-minded friends and encourage each other to push on, keep going, keep writing.

If you are reading this, chances are, you're one of those people.

So I worked on my blog. I looked at what everyone else was doing, and I worked to make my online persona as quirky and fun and interesting and personable as was convention. I started commenting on content that I liked. I started following writers whose thoughts I enjoyed. And, very quickly, I made friends.

Over the last two years, during which I've been absent from this blog, I've had a lot of life-changing experiences - as maybe you'd expect. At one end of the spectrum, I've experienced circumstances that were downright awful, circumstances that it took all my strength to pull through; on the other end, I've had an absolute blast learning new things and meeting new people and spending three months in the US over the recent summer and more.

But through all of that - and I can say this honestly - I missed blogging. I didn't miss writing posts or changing layouts or watching my number of followers tick up. I missed something more important than those things: the community. You.

And this is what it's about. Community. It's why we blog.

It's such an awesome and encouraging thing to be a part of here in our corner of the internet. Besides the advice and the rambles and the connections and the blogfests, it's encouraging be a small part of other writers' lives, to watch others accomplish their goals - whether it be crossing the thresh-hold from unpublished to published, or simply from not writing to writing a hundred words a day. That's exciting to watch, it's encouraging to watch, and it's something that I've missed about blogging.

The long and short of this post is that I've missed the community, and all the things that come with that. So, I'm back. Not, perhaps, in the way or the format that you'd expect, but we'll get to that. I have a ton of news to share, and we have a lot to catch up on.

But let's start with you. If there is anyone actually reading this, how are you? How's your day going? And tell me about your last two years!