Introduction

So, here we are. After many months of planning and writing posts in preparation, and of course asking the lovely Cat to design me a website, we are finally live, and I can’t explain to you all how excited I am about this new venture. If you don’t know me, you can read a little about me here, but for now you might be wondering where on earth this has come from.

As a kid, I experimented with many different kinds of writing; I wrote chapters of novels and short stories, and at eleven I produced a magazine in Microsoft Publisher, and then later a website to go along with it. That was one of a number of websites or blogs I created over the years, and I don’t know exactly when it was that I finally shut down my rather pathetic Blogspot that I started in addition to my YouTube channel, but it will have been a good few years ago now. At some point, I became acutely self-conscious of my writing style. It didn’t sound like me, it wasn’t funny enough, or clever enough. It sounded forced and not fluid. As a voracious reader, I think the pressure of reading so much excellent writing of all kinds caused me to give up completely.

This is blatantly a ridiculous way to think, especially about something that you fundamentally enjoy. I am going to suppress my perfectionist tendencies when it comes to my posts here. Much of what I’ve already written in preparation for this blog has also been quite long and rambly, and I’ve discovered perhaps where I always try to be concise and careful in my academic writing, it all comes tumbling out of me when I write informally (I say this as if I’m not always over the word count in my essays).

Why start writing again now? Having grown up a bit, I’ve realised I’m never going to match my own standards of writing. Just like almost everyone else, what I do will always seem more calculated and less effortless because I know the thought process behind it all. It’s finally time, at the grand old age of 23, to stop caring so much about how I might compare, especially because writing so far has been quite a cathartic, relaxing experience. Whilst I love YouTube, and it will always hold a very special place in my heart, I didn’t always feel I was expressing myself in the best possible way, or at least not expressing certain parts of myself. Since finally deciding to start writing again, I’ve come up with countless ideas that just couldn’t have worked in a visual way. Just as video can be a beautiful thing with its own virtues and unique ways of communicating, writing has offered me a whole different approach to lots of aspects of my life, and my online content. I needed a shake-up, and I also needed an outlet that could take me away from my academic writing. I do feel I should warn you all that this blog may be more of an online diary for me than it will be entertaining for you, but I hope you will find some of it useful and engaging nonetheless. Now, go and explore!