I wrote my first blog post in January of 2009. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was determined to try it. My son Teddy (blatant use of blog to endorse my son) had created a blog to have a web presence for his writing. You check out his webpage and his author’s page on Amazon here. He encouraged me to start a webpage or blog since I had started writing again. I created a website, Cathysvoice.com using Go Daddy and one of the options for pages was a blog. I posted my first blog on the Go Daddy site but quickly discovered Blogger and made the move.
I only shared my blog with a handful of people at the time. In fact, I kept some posts private, never sharing them with anyone. It took over a year before I made my blog a public blog, however no one really knew it was there. Many of my writer friends had started blogs and were using WordPress. I made the change to WordPress in June of 2012. I was getting braver in sharing my work. In May of 2012, I decided to going BlogaThon and commit to writing a blog everyday that month. I was officially hooked on blogging.
Today, I have almost 700 blog followers. and in the past two years, I have posted 211 blog posts. And no, I don’t assure that 700 people read every post. I assume a 10% hit would be a good day. I blog about everything from my weight loss/healthy living journey, to my recovery, to women who annoy me in bathrooms. I have written passionately about stories in the news about abuse or injustices. I have shared my joys, my triumphs, and my pain. A friend once asked me if I wasn’t concerned about sharing so much in a public forum. I assured him that I was no long concerned about that, after all, my blog is called Cathy’s Voice.
I have had the good fortune to meet some amazing people through blogging. I connected with them through their posts and shared emails and facebook chats with them. I attended a writer’s conference at Montreat and was pleasantly surprised to find one of my online blogging friends there. I even have a new friend in Australia.
I am a part of several online blogging communities. One of the sites offers the opportunity for other writers to give feedback about writing style, grammar, and more. There are often blogging challenges or the opportunity to share a blog post as a guest on another blog.
I often read debates questioning if blogging is really writing. I found this quote recently that says it best, “And it occurred to me that there is no such thing as blogging. There is no such thing as a blogger. Blogging is just writing — writing using a particularly efficient type of publishing technology.” (Simon Dumenco)
So, I will continue to write and share it in my blog, as well continue my other writing. I want to thank all of you who have supported and encouraged me in my writing journey. If you are a new reader or someone who has been following me for a while, I thank you and hope you will keep reading!
Cathy's Voice Now 
I’ve been blogging, off and on (mostly on), since 1999, and even now, 15 years later, I have asked myself the same question … is blogging really writing? Yes, it is words, and they are published in a (then) new technological forum, but also, with blogging, it feels more like a conversation (assuming you have comments open). I never thought of myself as a writer, but rather, as someone who likes to write, and it’s only been in the past couple of years that I’ve begun to call myself a writer.
I suppose I have always in some way believed that you can’t call yourself a writer unless you’ve had an actual hardbound book published, or if that is how you earn your living and pay the bills, but over these past 15 years, I’ve had so many other people call me a writer, that I finally started thinking of myself in that way. Either way, whether a writer, or a blogger that is also considered a writer, I think this newfangled (and not so new anymore these days) format of writing is a good thing, and has helped people around the world connect.
Congrats on reaching your 5 year blogging (and writing) milestone. It took me a lot of years before I could finally accept that having regular readers, or regular people that leave comments, had nothing to do with whether or not it was writing. Either way, the words appear on the page (electronically or otherwise); therefore, one who produces a collection of words is by definition, a writer. I look forward to hearing whatever it is you might decide to share as you continue the journey.
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