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.

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Thanks for reading and see you soon!
Etienne