Shhhhh…

I’m not really announcing anything here…

But. I’m thinking about blogging again.

For a #100DayProject.

Waaaay back in the earlier days of the internet, when it was mostly text and extremely slow loading images, I had a bit of a blog hosted on blogspot. I think I made a couple hundred posts, and it had about a quarter of a million page views.

It was a good way to break the fear of talking to nobody and everybody all at once via a public platform. The concept was writing exercises, because at the time I was establishing myself as a writer, and I really felt like I needed a purpose/frame/container around what I posted.

The first year, I wrote something like 175 posts. A LOT. And it worked so well for me because I was a mom of young twins who was highly creative but didn’t have the time to necessarily express that creativity, and definitely didnt have the mental or emotional bandwidtth to write longer content. In my mind, I thought I wanted to write novels. In my reality, a blog post was perfect.

In those days, I was also a professional freelance journalist. My “day job” writing was very structured and made with the purpose of channeling and curating another person’s story into a quarter page to a half page (or so) of newsprint.

Beyond those precious hours in which I interviewed and composed stories during the eight or nine hours a week that my kids were in preschool, I didn’t have time to dedicate to storytelling.

So… at night, after they went to bed, I sat down and spent 10-30 minutes most nights on the craft of writing. The concept was simple: make a prompt, set a timer (or don’t), and write to the prompt I’d created.

When I was a kid, I loved journals, but I never knew what to write in them. So my mom or I would make up games… write a story using these five words; make up an origin story of how the sun rises; mash up two characters into one; tell a fairy tale from the villain’s point of view. (Actually, not that one when I was young… I dreadfully believed that only leading ladies counted for anything, so I probably would have told the story from Cinderella’s point of view, or Ariel’s, and so on and so forth). It would take years for me to really appreciate the true beauty and magic of supporting characters, comic relief, magical fairies, and villains.

So, that was the idea. Prompt, timer, write, bed.

I didn’t have to worry about photos or layout or sharing to social media platforms or any of that. It was just to get it out there.

Eventually, I got tired of writing in the night, and thought sleep sounded better. I couldn’t fit it into my daytime life, so I stopped. And I never really missed it or looked back.

So… why blog now?

Well, a couple of newsletters ago, I linked my readers up to soooo many places, and after I sent it, I realized… I’m sending them to Instagram and to YouTube and to Facebook and all over the place… and only one link to my website.

Why, in that one moment that I landed in their inbox, when I had an opportunity to connect and come together, would I boost the traffic for social media platforms, instead of saying, “Hi! Welcome! Would you like to come over?”

It really didn’t make sense.

There’s a movement I’ve seen a lot lately, since I thought about that and thus since I’ve noticed, to stop putting so much effort into social media with it’s ever-changing algorithms and limiting reach, and to instead focus one’s efforts on your website, on your newsletter, and on showing up in ways that are more evergreen, that the creator owns, and that can be discoverable.

So, I thought… in this time of the 100DayProject… even though I am a complete nonconformist and I love breaking every rule and I make no promise to complete any arbitrary number… why not tap into that global creative energy and begin blogging here.

I’ll probably generally write a few posts at a time, and then schedule their release. Some with imagery, some without. Some to match captions and images I’ve already shared to social media, some brand new. Some light, some philosophical.

I won’t make a big announcement. I won’t promise to write 100 posts. I won’t create a theme around it. But I will keep my intention on my reasons for doing it:

Build an energy and habit for myself around coming to my website to create content and relationship.

Honor my third big goal this year, which is Visibility: Show Up and Share the Work.

And learn what and how to share more in alignment as I build out my shop here (selling original art is fabulous, but so far it has been through DMs, commissions, and galleries, and I need to make it easier for folks who aren’t physically nearby and for whom reaching out is a hurdle), create some goodies for people, and foster a relationship with patrons. (More on that soon.)

Although building community may seem like I’d want to open comments here, I won’t. Why? Because so many comments are spam and bots. If you do want to comment on anything, or chat about life and art and the blog topics and anything else, I’ll have some different ways to reach me. More on that soon.

In the meantime, in quietude, I send you love and rest and creativity and wonder. And I’ll be back soon.

xoxoxo, Alana