What Is This Blog About?

Honestly, I think the answer to that question keeps shifting. When I started this blog almost six years ago, its main purpose was to share my home renovation projects. Then as the renovation work settled, it became more of an outlet for my writing, occasionally fiction or poetry, but most often non-fiction essay or personal narrative. Recently, you may have noticed that this blog has been more of an opportunity for featuring art/sewing projects or showing off my collection of vintage and antique clothing.

Through all these phases, I think the title of the blog, Welcome to the Carriage House, is still apt. This blog is essentially inviting you into my home. Sometimes my home is full of work (especially the couple of years after I moved in). Sometimes my house is full of serious thoughts or fanciful stories, and I share these in writing. Sometimes my house is full of sewing projects or other forms of art, and I like to share these too through pictures and words. I’ve heard people say that writing should be a form of hospitality. I hope this blog is accomplishing that.

I want to assure you that I am still writing! I am continuing to work with the online writing group, the Habit, and I try to intentionally carve out time each week for writing/editing/publishing. However, publishing something to a personal blog often disqualifies it from other wider reaching publications. I still occasionally publish my musings here, but if I think a piece has potential, I’ll spend more time working on it and then submit it for publication. This can be a long process with publications sometimes taking months to get back to you with a response (or not) and then you often need to try several publications before you find the right fit.

This year, I made 27 submissions. Only one had been accepted up until October, but then in the same week I heard back from two publications that one poem and one non-fiction article were accepted for publication! When I’m able to, I’ll share the links to these with you all. One will be published in an online magazine and the other in a print exclusive journal (though it’s one of my favorite things I’ve written in the last few years so I hope some of you all will read it!)

What I’m writing has also changed a little. This year, I have been writing less short form. For the past 14 months or so, I have been mulling over an idea and doing a lot of preliminary work for a full-length novel. This month, I’ve started on a proper first draft after a lot of experimental writing and organizing. I am honestly not sure what fruit this will bear or if I’ll be able to see it to its end, but with what I have now, it is by far the most progress I have ever made on any long form work! It’s an exciting stage to be at!

So, in the absence of using this blog to publish my musings, poems, or stories directly, I am occasionally sharing updates and links when something is published elsewhere. As I said earlier, the blog is also a opportunity to share the other areas of my life, particularly creative pursuits. When I enjoy something beautiful (whether making it myself or finding something vintage that not many people would know about), I like to share that beauty with others so that they can enjoy it too. Writing and making art should be acts of hospitality.

Perhaps the themes of this blog will evolve again in the future, but for now, it all fits well with what is happening at my home, the carriage house.

P.S. Speaking of updates, this podcast episode is an interview with the editor and illustrator of the children’s poetry anthology that one of my poems is being published in! Pre orders will be available before Christmas and it will be officially launched and available to all in January.

Photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash