If you know me, you’d know that my life revolves around three things: Horses, baking, and writing. Sometimes I write about horses. Sometimes I write about baking. And sometimes (although not as often) I write about writing, and sometimes I write about riding, writing, and baking if I’m feeling particularly verbose and philosophical.
I am the very last person on earth to blog. By the time I hit publish on this post, everyone else on the planet will have already blogged, or vlogged, or tik-tok-ed, or Insta-movied, or whatever it is that people are now doing. I don’t really care that I’m a couple of years (or even a decade) late.
Words are my medium but for the balance of my professional life I have made sentences for the purpose of making money. Put simply, I’m a writer by vocation, and mostly because I really knew no other way to make a living. I’ve always been paid to write (or to edit, which I sometimes prefer), but this exercise in blogging is purely exercise a bit of creative blah blah. I’m going to experiment with NOT getting paid to write, but just writing, publicly.
What exactly are my goals for this blog? To build my platform (which in publisher-speak is putting myself out there enough to have some kind of audience), to exercise my writing muscles as much as I exercise my horses and my body, to actually practice the words I preach (to use a cliche) to my earnest and hardworking University of Guelph equine journalism students. The more you write, the better you get.
And because for the first time in my life I am actually NOT getting paid to write (well, I am, but just a little), I thought I’d try on what it feels like to write for free. No word count, no client expectations, no making sure I cover all the bases in the scope of work or marketing brief or whatever guidelines I’ve been given. Just me, and my fingers on the keyboard.