Five years ago today, I started this blog.
I've never truly been one for "New Year's resolutions", or New Year's at all, really, but just before 2020, I promised myself that I would start blogging again.
I've loved to write since I was six years old. I very clearly remember the first little "picture book" I put together. I had actually just watched an episode of Lamb Chop's Play-Along, where Shari Lewis gave instructions on how to make a little flip book of sorts of a girl jumping rope. I've always been a DIY disaster, so my attempt at recreating this little scene did not go according to plan. It frustrated me, but I somehow got the idea to turn it into a story that I titled "Jill's Bike". I don't remember the specifics of the story, but I believe it was about a girl, obviously named Jill, getting frustrated with her attempts to jump rope, and finally deciding to go and ride her bike instead. It was a short little story, probably three or four pages long, but I felt accomplished after I created it, and my family was impressed that I'd managed to turn my frustrating attempt to make the flip book, into something else.
I started writing and drawing out little stories more frequently after that, based on random ideas, or even things that happened to me in real life, such as one particular incident at the home of some neighborhood friends where an older sister got "pantsed" by a younger sister in the pool one afternoon. (My mother wasn't thrilled about that one!) I just seemed to always have a story in my head, whether it was some fictional fantasy or connected to something I observed in real life.
One afternoon, I was playing on the new computer my father had installed in the basement. For some reason, on that day, rather than simply play the games that I usually did, I wound up on the MS-DOS Home Screen and started just typing sentences. They ranged from just random things, to pieces of stories, to conversations I would pretend to have with the computer, usually in response to the fact that it would tell me "bad command or file name" after every time I hit enter. That was the day my father finally decided to show me how to use an actual word program, and I was truly on fire after that.
Every day I was writing little short stories on the computer, saving them, and presenting them to my parents once my father was home from work. I had a character named "Zip the Bee" that I often wrote about. I'm not sure how I came up with the idea, but Zip was, as his name implies, a literal bee who would appear to children that needed help with something or to learn some kind of lesson. The only Zip the Bee story I vividly remember was called "Patty Learns Where To Pee", about a girl called Patty, who was continually wetting her pants in class. Zip the Bee's claim to fame was making up a rhyme at the end of each story to help enforce whatever lesson he had taught, and this story ended with "Don't bump your head into a pole, the right place to pee is a toilet bowl." I have no idea how I came up with any of this, but hey, I was six.
Another story I distinctly remember was one about a teacher called Miss Apple Head, full name Miss Apple Head Poppyseed Flower Weed Good Deed Toe-Headed Brat. (The last bit of that was very obviously inspired by Hocus Pocus, though I didn't know the difference between "tow-headed" and "tow-headed" at the time.) Her best friend was named Principal Slug Mug and she made a promise at the end of the story to live on oats and corn. I have no idea why I wrote any of this, but it was the story that everyone in my family remembered the most and would often bring up years later, because it was so random and funny.
As I got older, I started attempting to write more long-form stories, and came into possession of my mother's old typewriter when I was probably ten or eleven. I used this opportunity to fashion together little chapter books, primarily about a group of tween-age friends, a la The Baby-Sitters Club or the Sweet Valley series. I was also writing silly poems around this same time, inspired by a local poet who often came to my elementary school and one year actually gave out free books. My family was astonished at the pace at which I would produce things, and I always had new material to share at parties and gatherings.
As I got older, and pressure from school and the like increased, my creative writing took somewhat of a backseat, unless it was for a school assignment. However, from middle school on, I became absolutely obsessed with journaling. I discovered that when I journaled, whether I was just recapping my day or venting about a specific event or issue, I would often come to other realizations about myself or a situation, and that was incredibly therapeutic for me. Any time anything bothered me, I forced myself to write about it, and almost always felt better afterward and was able to see things from a different perspective. It made me a better person, to be able to get my feelings out and analyze them like that.
In my junior year of high school, I joined LiveJournal at the insistence of some school friends. I'd long been a lurker on that site and often thought about making an account, but I wasn't sure how comfortable I'd be talking in a more public forum like that. Even so, I joined when the small group of friends I had in high school did, and we basically just wrote about our school days and went back and forth commenting. It was silly, as we all saw each other in school and talked at lunch, etc., but it was fun at the time and really broke the ice for me when it came to more social journaling.
In 2007, two years after I graduated high school, I finally decided to make a second LiveJournal account for my hobby at the time, collecting dolls. There I posted pictures, stories and bios I created for my dolls, thoughts on new releases, and nostalgic memories of my childhood dolls and toys. I truly enjoyed having this journal and it was through that very platform that I met some lifelong friends. I had that journal and posted there regularly for about ten years.
In between, I did try to start a Halloween blog, but this was before the Halloween community on social media really began to take off. My readers on that blog were really limited to friends I already had through LiveJournal, and while I of course had fun talking about Halloween things, I just never felt like it was really going anywhere, and I never knew what to talk about outside of hauls. Over time, my attempt at a Halloween blog became pretty much nothing but hauls, and I started to realize that I was falling into a trap of buying things for the sake of having something to talk about on the blog. So, I stepped away from it for a bit and then finally deleted it, thinking there was no real audience for something like that anyway.
And then came 2019. I'd had a transformative year in 2018. I'd changed a lot, left the doll hobby, and wasn't using social media nearly as much as I coped with major life transitions. I needed to find myself again, and as Halloween season 2019 approached, I found myself waking up a bit. I did some real Halloween shopping that year, when I hadn't been able to the year before, and started posting my finds, both from big box stores and small businesses/artists, on Instagram. I just sort of fell into perpetually posting about Halloween, and people responded to it. Aside from hauls and photos, I also started posting, in my captions, more detailed stories relating to Halloween, both of my own creation and of my own personal, vivid memories and feelings. From Halloween season 2019 on, I had many people tell me how much they enjoyed what I wrote, and how some of my stories and memories left them wanting more, more than could be put in an Instagram caption or comment.
The more I thought about it, the more I felt as if starting a blog again would be a good idea. I was starting to finally find my footing again with writing, and I have so many thoughts and memories relating to Halloween, why not try to get them all out into words and share them?
And so, I promised myself that I would create a blog in 2020, and I managed to pull it off on the first day of the year. And now, five years later, here we are.
I know that blogging may not be the most "up-to-date" form of social media, and I don't expect everyone to have the time to read everything, or anything, I write. But writing has always been my most comfortable and effective form of communication, and, if you've made it this far into this post, you know it's been a passion of mine for almost my entire life. All in all, regardless of who does or does not read it, I am happy and proud that I was able to create this space for myself, to organize and reminisce and get lost in my own world of eternal Halloween. And I truly appreciate everyone who has taken the time to read anything I may have posted here, whether it's one entry or all of them. I hope my words will resonate, even with just one other person, as the years go on.
Stay spooky, my friends.
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