Back To The Blog

Only a few of my closest friends will remember when this site had an active blog, pushing out daily content periodically for years. A bout of serious mental illness pulled me away from my writing in mid-2018, and at that point, the blog was abandoned, sitting stagnant for months until, when I decided to revamp the entire site in the spring of 2019, it was simply deleted. I knew that eventually I would return to blogging here, I simply needed to decide on a direction. And I believe that, at long last, I've found one.

WHERE IT BEGAN

The blogs (there were several) on this site have been through many phases.

When I first published joanndeleau.com, the blog picked up where I had left off on my first site, UCADaily, which I used to connect with my fellow online classmates throughout high school. I had begun a series there analyzing Dumbledore's most famous (and some lesser known) quotes. I copied some of those pieces over and kept adding to them, for a time. I included other things like book and movie reviews, and shared little nuggets of my personal life, or at least the parts that I felt could be useful.

Later, the blog became more fitness centered, when I began writing for YogiApproved and decided to table in sharing my yoga with Instagram. But I quickly decided that I was no fitspo content creator, and moved on.

Most recently, (read: 1.5 years ago) my blog was simply an extension of my freelance writing in general. I wrote about education, finance, mental health, relationships... anything I could think of, really. I pushed out a new post every weekday. And it worked! My readership grew for a short time, and I was proud of what I was creating, but ultimately I ended up feeling that those articles could've served me better if they had been submitted to other sites, building up my freelance career instead of being holed away on a blog hardly anyone looked at.

HESITATIONS

That brings us to where I've been for about a year: I want to have an active blog on this site, simply because I've always had an active blog. For so long I'd been trying to find a way to make the blog a useful part of the site, as important as the portfolio it's primarily intended to be, only to realize that doing so took away from my ability to expand that portfolio in the way I wanted. 

On the flip side, I also didn't want to have an overly personal blog here, as I'm not certain that my professional portfolio would be bettered by including the hardly legible thoughts I'm known for sharing in the wee hours of the morning. 

I avoided trying to find a solution, and the blog remained an empty and hidden web page, untouched and ignored, throughout the entirety of the site's redesign. Until now.

STARTING AGAIN

At this point, I've simply run out of reasons not to start blogging again. I have so many things I want to share here, things that won't take away from article ideas that deserve to be submitted elsewhere, and things that will help to bring more of who I am onto the site. 

So, if you're reading this, welcome! I hope you enjoy the ride.