Becoming a writer…

All my life (okay, for as long as I can remember), I’ve been the person who does the right thing. I made great grades in high school. Loaded up with scholarships, I attended a small university in my home parish (that’s the equivalent of a county for you non-Louisianians). I did quite well in college and earned my bachelor’s degree with top honors. Upon graduating, I immediately started on a career path and kept working at maximum effort for the next ten years, trying to find what made me happy. I even earned a master’s degree in that time in hopes that that would help me (it didn’t really). Ten years after graduating college, I was still desperately longing to figure out what it is that I wanted and how I could go about getting it. One day all that changed, and since then, I’ve never looked back. The path forward didn’t always seem clear, but I knew one thing, I had to keep moving forward.

My journey out of the regular working world and into a world where I work for myself is rooted in a literal journey. In the summer of 2012, I was invited out to California to attend a blogger event for Dole, the produce giant. How I was selected, I do not know. At that point, my blog was pretty terrible, and I had very few readers. Perhaps the people at Dole saw my potential or maybe they just thought I had what it took to do something better. Either way, that summer I found myself at the Carmel Valley Ranch rubbing elbows with bloggers who were much more experienced that I was and who took blogging very seriously at that point. For me, it was interesting – I liked to cook and publish my recipes, but that was really all there was to it until I found out that some of these people did their blogs full time. Wait, what? Really? That’s a real job? Here I was toiling away in obscurity at my job in advertising and some of these women were making a living from their blogs? I had to get a piece of that!

By the time I left that five day retreat, I decided I was absolutely ready for a big change. I’d decided that I needed to find a way to do my blog full time. Nevermind that at that point, I couldn’t use a camera or write to any effective degree. But I knew how to cook, and I knew how to develop recipes. I naturally assumed the rest of it would fall in line. As far as a revenue plan, I figured I’d jump in first and figure that stuff out later. Ah, I was so naïve, but I had guts and I wasn’t scared. Well, maybe a little, but I wanted to get out of my advertising job so desperately that once I figured out that Jeremy and I could subsist off his income for a while, I decided to act. I could figure out the details later, right?

I’ll spare you the agony of realizing that I had no idea what I was doing. I knew that I could cook, as I said, but I had no idea how to craft blog posts. I learned how to take a photograph with selective focus pretty quickly, but the lighting and composition of my photos took more time to improve. But improve they did. Over the next year, because I was working on it full time, not only did my photographs and my writing improve, but my recipes and techniques improved as well. As predicted, I grew into a blogger. In time, I moved beyond that space of newbie and into a place where I had more experience. It was in this experience that I realized that recipe blogging wasn’t my true calling. Just about a year after I embarked on the journey, I was ready to make another change. I loved the writing aspect, and I didn’t even mind the photography all that much. However, to say I’d found my “passion” and that food blogging was what I wanted to do with my life? Um, no, that didn’t happen. Not with food blogging.

However, it did happen with writing. I figured out that I liked to write and that I was getting better at it as I practiced and honed my craft. Along the way I picked up a 1,000 word per day writing habit, and I’ve been going strong on that for just over 16 months. As of today, I have an unbroken, 491 day chain going. To say I’ve dedicated myself to writing and to that particular journey is accurate. To say that I feel like I’ve found my calling and my path is also accurate. To say that I’m still working on figuring out exactly what my future in writing holds is also accurate. But I’m happy, I’m making some money, and I’m thrilled to see where this journey will take me.