What Will You Leave Behind to Become a Better Writer? ✏️
What are you willing to sacrifice? 🤔
I ended my podcast at the start of 2018.
I ran The Vacant Lot, a podcast dedicated to the cartoon Hey Arnold!, as a culmination of years of love for the series, spanning the course of 18 months and 20 episodes.
When I posted my farewell episode in January, I didn’t feel sadness for concluding the podcast. Rather, I felt relief. I spent the greater part of my childhood and a good portion of my adulthood obsessed with the show. I trawled fan forums, drew fanart, published fanfiction, paid artists for Hey Arnold! commissions. It was no great exaggeration to call me a Hey Arnold! superfan.
So when Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie aired in November 2017, I felt there was no need to continue my crusade on the show. It was time to move on.
Or so I thought.
For much of 2018, I came to the revelation that I wanted to take my writing seriously. I let my podcast page lapse in favour of a new branding page repositioning myself as a content creator of the written form. I contributed to Medium and began guest-posting on different writing-centric sites. I even wrote my first manuscript.
I was prepared to take my hobby into a new professional, marketing direction. In fact…