Restarting my writer's life

It’s been a while since I’ve been blogging, almost three years now. Long for someone who – one day – would like to earn a living with writing.

I always wanted to get back to writing and blogging. But I let myself get carried away by everything surrounding me. My work, my studies, my boyfriend(s), and other things that kept me from doing what I like: write. But that’s probably something that we all kinda know…

Then I read a Substack post by Michael Tatarski – a Vietnam-based journalist and writer that I follow on Twitter. I thought I should look at this platform.

I tried it out.

I even made myself a trial newsletter and subscribed to myself to see how it works and looks from the reader’s perspective.

After playing around with Substack, I did more research and compared similar platforms and ended up on Revue.

While I’m not sure which of these platforms is better, I tried out Revue longer than the 30 minutes I’ve spent with Substack. But I wasn't sure if Revue was what I was looking for either.

In the past, I used to blog via a self-hosted WordPress site. I did like the customisation that comes with it, but after a while, the technical maintenance got bothersome. I also have a “blog” on listed.to – which belongs to Standard Notes – a perfect solution if one wants to write anonymously.

But since I wanted something that looks more polished and is better integrated with other services and social media, I haven’t used that platform much yet.

And then came Ghost. Ghost is probably WordPress' biggest competitor at the moment when it comes to self-hosted and self-managed blogging platforms. After spending a few hours with Ghost, I'm impressed with its ease of use, clean interface, and the integrated solutions, as well as the native markdown support.

For a long time, I have been trying to write more in markdown – a format that lets you focus more on the content of a piece than arrays of buttons, formatting, and other unnecessary elements of many common formats in other text editors.

So, here I am. After three years of silence on the web, I’m trying again to write new articles that (hopefully) at least a few people (who are not my friends) will like.

I have not yet decided what I am going to write about. But, I will certainly talk about my life here in Vietnam, my relationship with my Vietnamese boyfriend, video games, tech, and maybe even some political and/or science topics. We’ll see.

I am planning to monetise the blog, should I be successful. At least for articles in which I put more research and that I deem valuable enough to offer for a few (digital) coins. But that’s another story and it will take at least 6-12 months before I seriously look at this issue.

If you want to follow me, you can connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, or subscribe to this blog.

Thanks for reading and see you soon!
Etienne