Celebration 500 - Post 1 - Why Did I Become A Blogger ?

Hellooooooo Goddesses

This week has been decreed a special week on Le Crumpet.  Not only is it the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations in the UK at the mo, we have another reason to rejoice – I have just posted my 500th post!  Yes.  That’s a lot.  And all in little under a year.

So this week has a few aims.   First, some reflections from me over this blogging almost-year; some contributions from my favourite friends; and a chance for us all to rejoice in this think we love called Nail Polish.

I thought I’d start today with why I decided to blog.  Why indeed.  It’s a question that stumps a lot of people – should they, shouldn’t they – and for me, it was semi-decided by a friend.   I’m a writer at heart.  I love reading, and I love writing.  I even wrote half a novel once.  I’m also someone who gets bored easily, and the reason I’ve never written a WHOLE novel is that I get bored with my own story once I know the ending – lol / irony.

The only pieces of writing in recent memory which had sustained my interest were short non-fiction pieces.  Let me go off on a tangent here.  My favourite writer of all time is Sylvia Plath.  There is just something about the inner voice she unleashed in 1962 which pierces me and makes me want to bleed words.   The Bell Jar is quite a heavy influence on my writing, as are the Blood and Guts auto-bio-proses of various other females – Elizabeth Wurtzel and Marya Hornbacher amongst them.  There’s something about that unflinching tone which just grabs me and won’t let go.

So (still on a tangent), the only “successful” pieces I’d written in a decade were a series of 12 that I’d written to my daughter Beth whilst I was pregnant.  I had wanted to capture the pure hideous evil that pregnancy can be, and that’s where The Silence of The Sisterhood series sprang from.   After that, I wrote sporadically, but they were always first person pieces, and usually they touched on the psychotic chaos of motherhood, or on the ever loitering shadow of depression.

Anyway, fast way way forward, and I got talking to someone at work and they asked to read these pieces.   She loved them, and said I should publish them or blog them, and gradually, the idea formed.  Blogging was an art form which was short and immediate enough to grab my attention without exhausting it.  And that’s how the blog started.

This was in February 2011, and if you scroll way back in the archives, you’ll see the Silence posts there.  Have you twigged yet what I’m not mentioning ?  That’s right.  Originally, this was never intended as a polish blog.  So how did we get from there to here ?

Well.  I intended the blog to be about various things.  Kind of like a columnist for a national newspaper, on my very own blog.   So it was going to have reviews on there – books, films, music – some recipes (I think there’s one), and I even started a series called 10 Things …

Now, you might notice a slight pattern here.  I start things.  And that’s really all I do.  I’m a starter, a high level, give me the headline, don’t bore me, that’ll do type of person (more on the latter later).   All of the above were very good ideas … as long as I got around to them …. Which I didn’t.  

And then in about August 2011 this evolved into a nail blog.  I’ll chart my polish journey separately later in the week, but August was when I did my first nail post – Deborah Lippmann Waking Up In Vegas.   My aim was to post approximately every other day, I thought that would be a good ratio, and I really did just assume I would be good enough from the get go.  Lol!

Interestingly, Sarah from Chalkboard Nails started her blog round about the same time.  Our stories are very different, as is our success, and speaks a lot to both the people we are and our values.  She started off on the right foot; me, I feel like it’s taken me until about now to know “who I am” as a polish blogger.

Tomorrow I’ll continue the story, and tell you how my intermittent blogging became a nail obsession.