Recommitting to My Creative Spirit: A Blog Questionnaire

I don’t think I’ve participated in a blog linkup/questionnaire since my college/post-grad days. But I saw a blogger friend post this to her site recently and thought it would be fun to do. It’s funny because I had already been thinking of ways I could branch out with my blog and this felt like a good opportunity to shake things up. Because my only categories are Reading, Writing, and Photographing, I sometimes feel restricted to of-the-moment life updates—like, I took some photos while traveling to this place last month, and this is what I’ve been reading lately, and here is a random poem I wrote the other day.

So, this has given me a good opportunity to get out of my comfort zone a bit. Thank you to Rachel Skirts for sharing the questionnaire on her blog!

1| Why did you start blogging in the first place?

Why does anyone pursue self-expression? I was an introverted kid who was more comfortable with books than I was with people. I loved the idea of creating new worlds through language, even if they were small ones. And my world often felt small, but writing gave me a way to magnify it. When I discovered blogging, it was the perfect medium for me to not only flex my creative muscles but connect with other people who were drawn to this form of creative expression.

2| What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

WordPress.com—the Personal plan that I don’t think is even offered anymore. I have bounced around a lot of blogging platforms in my time. I think WordPress.com was always the easiest for me to understand and maneuver, so it’s the one I gravitate toward when I want to start a new blogging project, which has been more than a few times in my life, obviously. I don’t mess with the new themes because I can’t figure them out, but I’ve always liked the legacy themes and customization tools. That’s actually what I’m using now. Libre 2 FTW! Truly, this is the happiest I’ve ever been with a blog.

3| Have you blogged on other platforms before?

YES. My first ever blog was on Xanga in middle school. I was somewhere between 10 and 12 years old. I remember writing about very specific and mundane life events, like hanging out with my cousins next door at a “pool” party where all the adults were in the pool house watching football or something while the kids were inside playing Nintendo 64 and downloading music on LimeWire. Then a few years later, when MySpace was all the rage, I used the profile journal to live blog an entire “novel.” The story was not good, and I would even venture to say largely problematic, but I enjoyed writing it.

However, when I was in college, I started a blog called Her Silent Musings on Blogger that I mourn to this very day. My tagline was something I made up on the fly as a romantic and slightly pretentious English major: “The beauty in misguidance is acquiring the ability to pave your own path.” I have fruitlessly attempted to revive this blog multiple times since my college years and it never sticks. In fact, no blog title ever sticks. I’m never happy with them. Using my name, while nerve-racking, seems to make the most sense. It’s direct and to the point.

With that being said, I’ve jumped around a lot of platforms using my name as my blog title: WordPress.com, WordPress.org, Squarespace, and WordPress.com again. I tried Substack to resuscitate HSM once, but only ever wrote one letter. So I abandoned it and stuck with this space, because I wasn’t writing enough to warrant both a newsletter and a blog.

I also had various other sites under different blog names between my college and post-grad years, such as Lauren in Waiting and Lauren Ever After on Blogger that were quickly abandoned. I also tried LiveJournal at one point, but I think that one was very short-lived because I don’t even remember the name of the blog I used there. It could’ve been under my given name. I created one blog on Squarespace called The Coffee Journals that I actually really liked. It was more literary and I wrote mostly book reviews. Unfortunately, I didn’t save any of them. I had a really bad habit of doing that. Call it creative self-sabotage. (I also wrote handfuls of poetry on an old work computer at my last job whenever work was scarce and I got bored. I deleted them all without saving anything when I had to switch to a laptop. *shrugs*)

4| How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

I write them in the WordPress.com editor. I have written a blog post in Pages before, I think, but I like using the internal editor because I can see what the formatting looks like as I write, especially if it involves photos. And that way I’m not having to do it twice by creating the post somewhere else first.

5| When do you feel most inspired to write?

Whenever it’s most inconvenient. I always want to write when I’m doing other things, like working. A long time ago, pre-pandemic, I would write Morning Pages before work when I could get myself up early enough to write before I needed to start getting ready for the day. I haven’t done that in a long time, though.

When I was still working from home and had a lot of pent up creative energy, I would journal or blog on my lunch break so I wouldn’t have to wait until after work to write something. I would also write from bed at night occasionally. Before the pandemic, I rented a house where I had enough room to have my own writing desk by my bed between two bookshelves. I miss having my own private writing space. I would often write late at night from my desk during that time, usually accompanied by a cup of tea. Or coffee, if it was morning. Or wine, if it wasn’t. Or sometimes tea with a little whiskey poured in. I went through this phase where I would drink Charleston Tea Garden Peachy Peach Tea with a little peach-infused whiskey. Delectable.

I, like a lot of us, usually have to write whenever I can find the time. For instance, I’m writing this not necessarily at my most inspired but because it’s a Saturday morning and I have the time to do it. I started writing this post last night (Friday evening), after I’d gotten home from work, fed the pups, and had something to eat. Now (Saturday morning) I’m sitting outside on the covered porch with the pets and writing against the backdrop of some fairly loquacious birds.

6| Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I don’t generally publish a post immediately after writing it. However, when I wrote my Fall Reads 2024 roundup, I wrote half of the post in one sitting and wrote, edited, and published the other half in a second sitting a couple weeks later. That was mostly because I didn’t want to forget it in my drafts, which has happened before. And this post I wrote and edited over the course of a weekend before publishing.

However, I recently published a poem on my site that had been sitting in my drafts for close to a year. And I have another post that has been sitting in drafts for close to two years, because I started writing it while I was reading the book the post is about in 2023 and have been editing it ever since. It is more or less ready to be published now, I just have to decide when.

I typically never post something the same day that I write it, though. And that largely has to do with the amount of time I have to write in a single sitting. I’m usually taken away by life here and there while working on a post, so it could drag on for days, weeks, months, while I fine tune what I want to say.

7| What’s your favorite post on your blog?

My archives are not very extensive at this point. I only started this particular site in 2023 and don’t have a regular posting or writing schedule like some hardcore bloggers. I’ve never been like that with any of my blogs, though I have surely tried. With that being said, I have a special affection for a post I wrote about the book, The Quarry Girls, last February, followed by my Winter Reads 2024 post, in which I wrote it more as an essay and less as a series of mini book reviews. And, of course, the first post I wrote on this space holds a special place in my heart, as it was a marker of my recommitment to my creative spirit.

8| Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

Not currently, but never say never. I did try a redesign recently along with a blog title change. I still used the Libre 2 theme, but changed the header image and some of the customization options so that the functionality was slightly different. I was inspired by a copy of Eudora Welty’s short stories sitting on my bookshelf one night, so briefly this blog was named, “The Collected Stories of…” That only lasted a few days, though, before I reverted it back to a self-titled site.

I don’t know, it seems to me that the best way to “brand” myself is just by being myself. I’ve preferred the minimalist theme of Libre 2 where using my own photos brings the design to life. I have considered moving my blog to another platform, but haven’t made concrete steps to do so simply because I’ve been satisfied with WordPress.com’s Personal plan features. Like I said in question 2, I’m not good with the site design aspect unless it’s very user friendly. At the end of the day, I feel like I currently have the blog I wanted to have when I started this one in 2023. It’s simple and unfussy. I don’t want to try to fix something that isn’t broken.

Let me know if you participate in the questionnaire so I can link your post! Happy writing!

—LMB