I recall the first time I pressed publish on a blog post; it was 2010, flushed with January’s new year’s resolution, and using ‘Blogger’, which was the original, rudimentary blogging platform. Writing on the internet was a relatively new method. In what may seem like a pathologically strange pursuit, I started publishing regularly, gained a following, started to inhabit the space of a writer who blogs. Then years later – when I’d made friends online, some of whom are still very special to me – I published hundreds and hundreds of posts, learned my trade so to speak, and used the content to gain entry for a Masters degree in Creative Writing. After that, I lectured about blogging and writing, ran workshops, waxed lyrical about the benefits it had brought me – which are too varied to list (although I’ve tried before).
So I still write on the internet, but I do so elsewhere, and won’t be publishing on this blog anymore. There are two strands to this reasoning; one is that I have become reluctant to be quite so public with my life, which I realise flies in the face of the modern way of oversharing.
Don’t worry, I fully overshare where I do publish now, it’s just that readers have to pay a couple of pounds to subscribe and read along. This is something I grappled with for a long time, and still do, but I also see that creative work must be renumerated, and now there are better ways to achieve that. I wrote about it here.
To read my work now, please do go to Patreon.com and search: Lou Bradford Writes and you will find thoughts, essays and opinion pieces, just like there were here. I can be found on Instagram here.
Thank you for everything, always.
Lou x