Toronto Bound: The Circle of Blogging
One of the things I’ve learned from blogging: editing (and filters) matter.
I began my blogging journey almost four years ago. The Suitcase Scholar started out as humble little Blog on the Run, a WordPress-hosted blog that I mainly updated via iPhone. I created Blog on the Run as a way to document my summer of 2009 travels–a week spent in the mountains of North Carolina at the Wildacres Writers’ Workshop and another week spent in Vermont attending the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference.
In late 2010 I switched over to a self-hosted site and The Suitcase Scholar as you know it today was born. Except that it really wasn’t ‘as you know it today’; because you see, this blog is always growing and evolving–along with the way I travel and the frequency with which I travel. For example, at the beginning of this calendar year, it was my personal goal to take at least one short trip per month, even if that was a quick weekend break. As it turns out, in the first half of this year I’ve not just traveled once per month, I’ve been in the air at least once every month (and dont’ even get me started on the road trips). With a new travel-dependent job on the immediate horizon, I’m not planning on slowing down any time soon.
Yes, my life is changing rapidly. And The Suitcase Scholar has grown to become far more a part of my life than I’d ever dreamed possible. I used to call it ‘the best hobby ever’. Today I consider it to be the best lifestyle ever. And I’ve learned so much about blogging already, not limited to but including:
1. Some stories should remain untold.
2. In photos and in writing, editing matters.
3. The world is full of surprises.
4. Overplanning is bad, and there is much to be said for underplanning (see surprises comment above).
5. The world is beautiful. All of it.
6. A travel blogger never travels alone.
and, finally and possibly most importantly…
7. It is so, so, so important to never stop learning.
Which why I will be traveling to the Travel Blog Exchange Annual North American Convention in Toronto this weekend. There I will meet with other travel bloggers–most far more experienced than I–and learn how to best move forward with The Suitcase Scholar in the years to come. And while I was originally rather skeptical about attending such a conference, I’ve since (virtually) met an amazing community of people on Twitter; I can’t wait to meet many of them in real life–and begin learning from and with them.
Thus, I feel I’ve come full-circle. From a girl with an iPhone blog at a writing workshop to a woman toting her Macbook Pro (and iPhone. And dSLR camera. And chargers and power strip) at a blogging conference. My life continues to lead me to new learning opportunities, and I could not be more grateful.
Again- LOVE the picture.
By now you have enough experience (and such style) that you will be helping others. Not that you won’t learn things, too. But you are a much better writer than you seem to give yourself credit for.
Again–thanks! And again, it looks nothing like me. But it fit one of my points in my post, so I was forced to use it again. Ha.
I will actually not be helping others. The dynamic here is…odd. And thanks for the writing compliments. But I assure you, writing has as little to do with blogging as children have to do with teaching. (I’m assuming you will understand this more than most; it was an analogy created especially for you. Yet another service I provide–personalized analogies.)