My blog’s Anniversary

One of my good friend, Shree Harsha is celebrating his blog’s 1 year anniversary and during the months of June and July he is asking some of his friends to do a guest post on his blog and I got a chance to do my part too at his blog. Hearty congratulations for him and his blog. And while I was talking with him about what I should write, I remembered that even my blog needs to celebrate its anniversary which was on 10^th June actually. So I’m an eleven days late in recognising one of the proudest moments of me being a writer. Nonetheless, it’s never too late right?

So he asked me to write about me being a blogger and what got me into writing and how is my journey in the blogging world so far. I’ve never written about myself and especially on my creative writing side and so this is a first and quite a toughie for me as anything related to me, results in a lot of writer’s block in my mind. Since I hate being in the writer’s block loop, I’m going to try and make this post readable and interesting (oh, please don’t fall asleep!).

So here are some of the questions asked by my friend and some other questions that I ask myself to give an outlook for this historic journey of the author behind Neha’s Journal. (Since this is all about me, I shall shamelessly brag here and there!).

When did I start writing?

It all began with a pencil and a paper and also a chalk piece and a black board when I was about 5. I had just learnt my alphabets and the teacher at the kindergarten had done an excellent job in making me write my very first set of cursive alphabets. And that was when I realised, 17 years later I would become a famous blogger. Okay, that might have gone a wee-bit over the top!

Coming to the genuine part: Writing has been one of the most familiar things for me. Well, everyone writes. Even kids who hate writing has to write when given assignments. Even I was one of them. I hated writing. My hand would pain and I never really learned to improve my hand-writing. So that was me when I was 7 or 8.

But one day my whole perception towards writing changed. All because of a movie called “Harriet the spy”. I was 11 when I saw this movie and somehow spying on friends and writing about them in a book fascinated me more than anything else (talk about television having its influence on young minds!). Even playing with stuffed animals and barbies started to become boring for me from then onwards.

And so I started with this whole diary business. At first it was just a book filled with drawings and stuff and not much related to any actual writing. But when I stepped into 7^th grade, that was the starting point of the whole teen-age drama for me, I started to notice things other than pencil boxes, erasers, insects and butterflies. I started to notice “people”. My classmates and their individual behaviour, their laughter, their temper and their voices seemed very interesting for someone who loved to observe and write about them.

Somehow without my knowledge, genuine observing became notorious spying and I became the mecca of class gossips. I with my gang of friends used to spy on some of the class boys who went to weird places to play cricket. The boys came to know about this and we got into trouble. And I used to write about everything that transpired at school. Now when I turn back those pages, and read my past writings (with sever grammatical errors and heart-rending spelling mistakes!) I feel good to go back to those days through my words. They are fun to read. So who said writing isn’t fun?

Can I give a little insight to what actually I write in my non-digital journal?

Okay, my journal book is too mundane. It’s filled with typical stuff about fears and gloominess. Somehow I write there when I’m lost. But there are times when I write when I’m extremely happy too but they are rare. Ever since I started blogging, I’ve declined writing in my journal. It’s a sad thing for me. But I do write whenever I get an idea to a story. All the story plotting stuffs are extensively done in that book as of now.

So here is a little sneak-peek into my non-digital journal. It’s something I wrote a few months back on the occasion of buying a new journal to continue my writing extravaganzas;

In the silence of the night, I sat staring blankly at my new un-penned book. Is today another day for the reign of the “writer’s block” to take over? Or should I just write about writer’s block for the sake of writing something in my new purple notebook that I purchased from the local mall for a very high price plus taxes? Sigh, maybe a random poem might help;

The things I do,

I do for reasons unknown.

Unknown is the reason,

A reason nonetheless.

Nonetheless I try,

Try I do, to bring out the best.

Best is a wild, wicked dream;

And I dream for a reason,

A reason nonetheless.

                                            ~Neha 

When did my blogging journey begin?

I seriously started blogging in 2011. But before that in 2009, I first created a blog page for fun. Back then I was in 2^nd year of engineering and even though I was a computer science student, the simple blog layout used to confuse me a lot and blogging seemed like a complicated business. All those tools, labels and pages... sounded like some geeky place to scroll over.

As the semesters went by, I started to show more interest as started to understand what a web page was. Of course, even a small kid can blog these days, but I was under the wrong assumption that only people who knew about the technical stuff can blog! But extra knowledge doesn’t hurt too. I see blogging differently these days. It’s not just a place to post my writing but it’s also a place where I study different HTML and CSS codes with interest.

What does writing mean to me?        

                   

From a year and a half I’ve been seriously bitten by the writer’s bug. Now that my creative writing side was starting to wake up, I started to write a lot of poems. And poems helped me to think in an abstract manner. Poems actually have the ability to broaden the way of thinking. They are creative, fun and imaginative and it’s every creative writer’s dream to escape from reality now and then.

For the first time I actually completed a four page story called “The Premonition”. I was really happy with my effort as it was one of those attempts in writing that I had truly completed so far. I wanted audience to read my writing and provide me with valuable feedback. At first I was apprehensive that people would laugh at my work. But most of my friends and even my mom (she is a tough critic) said I really did have something going here. So finally, took the leap and started to share all my work at Neha’s Journal.

Why the name Neha’s Journal?

Well that’s how I started to write. Initially it was a typical girl’s personal diary but as I grew up, so did my knowledge and my experiences in life. I underwent a lot of failures and even saw a little bit of success here and there. I fell in love and broke up too. Its experiences and milestones such as these that strongly triggered the writer in me.

The bottom line for me when it comes to writing: IT GIVES ME PEACE.

It leads me to join all the pieces together – life, love, misery, death... you name it. I find that I’m in close contact with my life and surroundings through my writing. Many people live their entire life on the go and when they die, their stories go untold. I feel that it’s a waste of a person’s soul. One should at least leave behind something from which the others can actually know who they were.

Photographs are only still memories at a particular point in life. But writing... it’s like a movie of your life, a movie which the readers can view in their minds when they read a person’s writing. It’s a movie each person can witness in his or her own terms of imagination.

By now I can tell without a hitch that I have practically grown up writing and hence writing for me is LIFE.

Blogging and Bloggers:

For some of my earliest posts, I had some very few visitors who were patient and kind enough to leave behind a comment or two. Their appreciation and constructive criticism encouraged me to better my blog as well as hone my writing skills. In the last one year, I have had around 16,000 visitors and counting. Around 97 bloggers are kind enough to support me through following my blog.

I’m no famous or top rated blogger. I’m still an amateur and I have a lot to learn. I write to attain peace. Writing is always stress-free. And reading other blogger’s post is also a nice way to forget about my own worries. Writing and reading go hand in hand. If you want to be a good writer and want to people to recognise your work then you have to get out there and appreciate other bloggers. One shouldn’t do it for a selfish reason. You must develop genuine interest in reading other writer’s work. And reading is definitely not a waste of time. Think about all the ideas you can get through reading different posts by different authors. Each person has his/her own style of writing and you can always gain and learn different ideas from them.

And just a few months back, I registered myself at Indiblogger and started to post my work at the Indivine. It’s a top Indian blogging site with over a 100,000 bloggers from all nationalities and inter-states of India who get together at the site and share their posts. If people like your post then they vote for you at the indivine. You can follow fellow bloggers and broaden your network. It’s one of those sites from where genuine readers visit your blog and give back valuable feed-backs.

And I’m very happy to say that so many people have visited my blog and it’s a privilege to visit their blogs and interact with them and in turn grow my network over the months.

There are so many bloggers/authors out there who have a huge potential to become the future Paulo Cohelo or Rabindranath Tagore or Enid Blyton. I’m glad I could be a part of the blogging world and even gladder that I get to share a part of my world with them.

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