Getting back to blogging
A few days ago, I got an email from Typepad announcing they’d be shutting down their blogging service on September 30, and letting me know I should export all my content before then if I wanted to keep anything. It came as a surprise, but after the first few seconds of surprise, it had that feeling of truth that, combined with the surprise, comes with any good plot twist in a book.
I’m sorry to see Typepad go, because I’ve been a customer since March 2007, first for my Engineered blog (on engineering and higher ed) and later my writing blog, which had various names over the year but for most of the time was called Italics are Mine as a nod to Nina Berberova (1901-1993), a Russian exiled author turned US resident whose writing I adored when I was in high school in Belgium in the early 1990s. and it played a key role in my hanging on to my identity as a writer in the long years before I completed my novel, got an agent for it and, after a long road, got it published last September (THE PARIS UNDERSTUDY, check in out from Alcove Books).
But I had also stopped blogging for several years by the time the Typepad email found my inbox. I had gotten tired of writing for free and I wanted to focus on getting my novel published. Only recently had I meant to resume blogging in Italics are Mine, but the Texas floods had distracted me because I’ve been living in Dallas for the past nine years now and I can see so well how some people there would not think twice about putting 7yo girls in cabins in flood beds (the most dangerous part of a flood-prone area). I’d meant to write about my road trip to Oklahoma, my second novel, several other writing projects, a couple of other trips, what I wish my younger self had known when it comes to “making it” (loosely defined) in the literary world. Now that Typepad is shutting down, I’ll have to finally launch my newsletter on my website, but as I gather ideas and write drafts of newsletter issues, I figured I’d first pen a few blog posts for my Goodreads page, since it’s been my observation that Goodreads attracts the most committed readers and some people have followed me on here for many, many years, before I even got an agent (thank you so much for your support, it’s meant so much to me, especially when I doubted I’d ever get published).
I’ll probably post first drafts or abridged versions here of posts I plan on including in my newsletter. If there’s a topic you’d like me to cover, please let me know in the comments.
Thank you and have a great Labor Day’s weekend.
-Aurelie
“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.”
-E. E. Cummings.
I’m sorry to see Typepad go, because I’ve been a customer since March 2007, first for my Engineered blog (on engineering and higher ed) and later my writing blog, which had various names over the year but for most of the time was called Italics are Mine as a nod to Nina Berberova (1901-1993), a Russian exiled author turned US resident whose writing I adored when I was in high school in Belgium in the early 1990s. and it played a key role in my hanging on to my identity as a writer in the long years before I completed my novel, got an agent for it and, after a long road, got it published last September (THE PARIS UNDERSTUDY, check in out from Alcove Books).
But I had also stopped blogging for several years by the time the Typepad email found my inbox. I had gotten tired of writing for free and I wanted to focus on getting my novel published. Only recently had I meant to resume blogging in Italics are Mine, but the Texas floods had distracted me because I’ve been living in Dallas for the past nine years now and I can see so well how some people there would not think twice about putting 7yo girls in cabins in flood beds (the most dangerous part of a flood-prone area). I’d meant to write about my road trip to Oklahoma, my second novel, several other writing projects, a couple of other trips, what I wish my younger self had known when it comes to “making it” (loosely defined) in the literary world. Now that Typepad is shutting down, I’ll have to finally launch my newsletter on my website, but as I gather ideas and write drafts of newsletter issues, I figured I’d first pen a few blog posts for my Goodreads page, since it’s been my observation that Goodreads attracts the most committed readers and some people have followed me on here for many, many years, before I even got an agent (thank you so much for your support, it’s meant so much to me, especially when I doubted I’d ever get published).
I’ll probably post first drafts or abridged versions here of posts I plan on including in my newsletter. If there’s a topic you’d like me to cover, please let me know in the comments.
Thank you and have a great Labor Day’s weekend.
-Aurelie
“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.”
-E. E. Cummings.
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