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| photo c/o Jessica Joan Pinkstone |
"Hello. It's me. I've written this post a thousand times and then just pressed delete." - If Adele was a blogger.
I've been writing this post for close to two years. Some days just in my head, on a few occasions I even wrote it down. One brave day I even typed the post up in blogger. My life changed a lot in between those times and somewhere I pressed delete.
Stir and Scribble was created as a safe place for me to practice writing and food photography. Very few readers will remember that it was once a Tumblr page, but, before Tumblr was a thing. I look back at most of the old posts and cringe. The writing was bad, the photos were silly. But it was my lovely little corner of the internet anyways.
I got it in my head that blogging full time would be the next step in my career. I had already spent the better part of a decade working for Alton Brown, and honestly I'm still not really sure what the 'next step' from that kind of work might be, but blogging was going to be the thing.
I took every class. I attended every workshop. I rebranded. I moved to wordpress. I tweeted, I pinned. I did all the things that the good, big bad bloggers do. And a terrible thing happened: I lost my voice.
So much time was spent trying to catch 'some big break' as a food blogger, so many hours wasted on pin-able images, that I lost sight of the whole thing.
The silliest part, of course, is that I basically had the dream culinary job already. I worked full time for one of the biggest names in food media. I worked on New York Times best selling book series. I got to write recipes, cook, talk about food, and occasionally take pictures at my day job.
In the last two years, in between all the drafts of this post - the written and unwritten - I've learned a lot. I stopped working for Alton full time. I had another baby. I freelanced as a food stylist and some times copywriter. I went back to work for Alton. And I've pulled back from this place.
I'd like to get back to where I started. I still need a place to write awkwardly, to take crappy photos, and to find my voice. Frankly I'm tired of being another white-brunette-lady-food-bloggers who is equally earnest and witty. I need more deep conversation, more interesting images, and I think the internet might need that too. I'm not quitting this space, I'm just quitting this photo, text, recipe formula familiar to blogs.
Fair warning that I'm about to delete a bunch of old posts and things are going to get awkwardly bad around here again while I try to figure it all out. Hope you'll join me.