Notes on the First Anniversary of my 7th Blog

Origins

I started this blog near the end of last April, impulsively, after I read the words ‘ephemera and detritus’ in a comment on a blog I’ve long since lost track of.  Possibly from Salon’s now defunct Broadsheet. Rather than just noting it down and having a chortle over the awesomeness of the imagery as I am normally wont to do, I bought the domain name.  Oddly enough, there was no competition for it.

I already had about five other dormant and semi dormant blogs at the time, most under my aliases koangirl and yaramaz.  I collected blogs, just as I had accumulated paper diaries during my Luddite years. Blogs take up less space, luckily, so my parents don’t have to buy more Ikea storage boxes.

This blog was born near the tail-end of my rather elongated 12-week self-paced writing course through MatadorU (which I do recommend, as it’s a very well-thought-out, very hands-on course). I had entertained vague ideas of trying to be a professional travel writer, as I had been writing about travel since, well, 1994, and people had told me I was rather good at it.  My ego was confident that it could be done, though my PayPal account could not vouch for my abilities. It held only the $50 (minus service charges) I had earned from two articles I wrote in mid-2009.  I am only prolific when writing for free.

Surely I had my 10,000 hours of practice by that point, I thought.  I had been writing since I was four, when I put together a graphic novel about a man, a dog, a house and possibly a cat. I had a box somewhere back home full of hand-written time-travel historical novellas (with detailed illustrated floor plans of secret passageways and hidden lairs) from when I was ten. I had a collection of detailed journals that reached up to my thighs when stacked atop one another. I had decades of awkward and embarrassing rambling dispatches from abroad under my belt.

All that needed to be done now was to fine tune things a little, learn all about new media marketing and all would be well.  But I hadn’t anticipated what actually ended up happening. I overdosed on writing. On travel writing in particular. By summer, I wanted nothing to do with it.

Side Effect 1

The following words started to make me break out into metaphorical rashes: local (both adjective and noun), culture, authentic, traditional, nomad, travel, round-the-world (aka rtw), traveler, tourist, backpacker, hostel, digital nomad, location independent, cubicle-dwellers, 9-5, SEO, lifestyle, street food, wander(er), adventure(r).

Process

The MatadorU course took me about 16 weeks and I never actually submitted assignments for the last few modules, though I did the readings, passively. I started this blog instead, somewhere around week 13. I signed up for the NaBloPoMo and forced myself to post every day for the first month. For the self discipline. A half-hearted Natalie Goldberg kind of move. You’ll notice if you go back in my archives that my earliest posts were short and specific, focused on some kooky/nifty/notable aspect of Shanghai. Usually mop or doomed chicken related. Nobody read or commented. Page views were negligible. My writing slowly petered out. I was running out of things to say about Shanghai. Which didn’t matter as no one was reading what I wrote anyway, at least back then.

Side Effect 2

I was fried. I was tired. I was irritable.

I had about 45 illegible, nonsensical research papers to mark at work. I was being trained to mark even more as a part-time job. I was reading a million other travel blogs for the MatadorU course and disciplining myself to give thoughtful  feedback on my virtual classmates’ new projects. I was beginning to resent the written word. I was beginning to resent my feeble entry into the world of travel blogging. My online persona now felt like the awkward, isolated (but artsy! creative!), unfocused dork I had always been in the real world.

Process 2

I had done it all wrong from the beginning, in retrospect. A scattered effort. Unmatched metaphorical bras and panties. Let me show you what I did wrong.

My domain name doesn’t match my blog title.

My mostly ignored Facebook fan page is only tangentially connected to the title of the blog.

My Twitter user name has nothing to do with either the blog title or the domain name (I had registered it a year previously).

You know who is a model of consistency? UnbraveGirl. She is UnbraveGirl in domain name, in blog title, in Twitter, in Facebook, in email address. Even her business card says she is Unbrave Girl. Not only that, but UnbraveGirl is catchy and easy to spell. And people know who she is.

I have received messages from people who had just pieced together the fact that I was both Ephemera/Detritus and Koangirl and Yaramaz and MaryAnne. My personae require persistence and detective work.

Process 3

This blog started out as a blog about Shanghai, and tangentially about the trips I took away from Shanghai (Yangshuo, Harbin, etc). Short posts, local flavour, relevant photos. Sometime around July it shifted and I started posting long rants. Rants about work, about being exhausted by travel, by crowds, about frustrations of living in China. Those got a few comments. Those got a few more readers. The posts grew longer and darker and more personal: grim weather, dead chickens, freezing cold, monkey bites, genocide, loneliness. More comments, more readers. I was slowly becoming known, but not as a travel writer, but rather as a location-specific jaded diarist of sorts.

When I started running out of my own words and had hit a sort of brick wall with my life in Shanghai, I sent out the call for expat interviews, hoping they might help to clarify things a little. That post alone got more page views and comments than any other in the shortest period of time. At that point, I started to realize that none of this was about me at all.  This hunch was confirmed when one after the other the interviews I posted got more views and more comments than anything I had written. This realization was both discomfiting and a relief.

I learned through the interview series that I wasn’t the only one with mixed feelings about the whole living abroad thing. That it isn’t necessarily easy emotionally. That just quitting your 9-5 cubicle job and running off to faraway pastures (or cities) doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve solved anything. Not that I’ve ever run away from a 9-5 cubicle job. I never had one to begin with. I was actually entertaining thoughts of getting a 9-5 back home, just for the comfort, stability and familiarity. It’s hard to know what to do when it seems like everyone is talking about running away to the life you’re trying to escape (or at least, trying to rearrange in a more pleasing manner).

End Notes

The writing will continue as it has been. It will change. Maybe next month I’ll post illustrated haikus. Or maybe more student pieces. Or something about Gerald the Bear or Water Monsters. There will be no unified focus. Because I have none. And this blog will continue to be an SEO nightmare because of this lack of focus. Whatever. It’s mine and I can do whatever I want with it. Teaching pays the bills. That leaves me with complete freedom and creative control in my writing.

Next week I’ll post my series of interviews with imaginary water monsters.

Yes.

That will be pleasurable.