This seems more like a post you’d see at the beginning of one’s blogging career, but here I go being a rascal and not following logic. I started thinking about this blog today not only because I feel like I’ve been slackin’ on it, but also because I really wanted to discover the real reason why I started blogging in the first place. Hopefully, at some point, you’ll think about the reasons why you started blogging and make connections with other bloggers/writers.
I always had a passion for writing ever since a group of neighborhood kids from my teen years and I started making our own home movies. Film was my first passion, but then I was acquainted with writing when my friends and I were stumped on ideas for our next film project. I told them I would handle it and they wouldn’t have to worry about it. I then told them I would come back the next day with a full story idea written out. When I sat at home alone for hours on end into the night, I, too, was just as stumped as the collective. It wasn’t until I read numerous gruesome news articles on Yahoo! that ideas began to brew in my head. I penned some simplistic story about a serial killer that filmed each kill of his. The group liked the idea, but I felt the story itself was underwhelming and the movie we filmed based on this idea was complete crap. But hey, you can’t expect 15 year-olds to make Oscar material.
It was senior year of high school and I needed one more class to fill out my schedule. Every cool class was taken up and a class called ‘Mass Media’, a class where you got to make movies basically, was removed from the list of available classes. Creative Writing I was the only other option I had. I absolutely dreaded this because, but when I got to the class it quickly became one of my favorites in the history of my education. It was the first and only class where I had creative freedom to do whatever I wanted, even if the subject material of my writing was inappropriate at times for high-schoolers to read. There was one assignment where we had to start a blog and post once a day on anything we wanted for one week. We also had to read and comment on other classmates’ posts. The first post I had written was “The 7 Worst Types of Girlfriends.” The post was a huge success, and I could tell because like our own WordPress blogs you could see how many times the post was viewed and how many comments there were. I remember vividly that this first post garnered 142 views and generated 32 comments. Every other post had on average 20 some views and relatively few comments. Each post I had written afterwards for that week I received the same praise for my written work, even from this one girl in class who I thought was drop dead gorgeous and never noticed me in class until this week. I told everyone I was going to start a blog if I was going to receive such positive reviews, but the project never came to fruition.
It wasn’t until my freshman year of college where I got dead serious about starting a blog. The girlfriend I had my freshman year had an active blog on Blogger. I told her that I was a writer myself, but I literally had nothing to give her, so it basically came off as bullshit and I couldn’t show her my talent. Still, even with motivation to show my then girlfriend that I was a good writer, I didn’t take advantage.
As I’ve said before, I had a blog before “My Seven Devils” on WordPress called “A Living Oddity.” The latter of the two was my first real commitment to writing during my sophomore year of college after I had transferred universities. I realized after the first semester at my new school that I made the biggest mistake of my life and I wanted to go back to my old university. I had no friends besides my two roommates at the time. I relied on them to get me through the repetitive, everyday routine that is established during your school years. When they weren’t around because they were attending classes or other matters, I was left to myself on a frequent basis. The old idea of creating a blog then came to mind. I wanted to write because I pretty much had no one else to share my writing with. I thought it was interesting how I didn’t start a blog despite the positive reception I had in the past with my writing, only to start one when I literally felt like I had nobody. It was through blogging, first on “A Living Oddity” that I felt I had a connection with others, even if it was only through the Internet to read and comment on other blogs.
Writing on a blog at first was a big risk to me because I thought people would be offended by the subject material, or they would just straight up dislike it and think I was a terrible writer. I’m still not entirely sure how people feel about my writing, but I’m just happy that I started a blog anyway. It’s a great feeling to have even if one person likes or comments on your post. It shows that you’ve engaged them through your own words, and it’s quite rewarding.
My Seven Devils 