I started writing tinyempire when Tom and I remodeled our first house in Halsey. After we bought the farm that we would call Soggy Bottom Ranch, sold the Halsey house and moved to the Ranch, things in our relationship got sad and tense and exceptionally hard. We had more bad days than good. I spent a lot of time trying to make it my problem by trying desperately to try to “fix” myself so I would be able to “fix” the relationship because we were so in love with each other still. Obviously that didn’t work and our problems weren’t just mine. During that pain, I needed a place to write about what I was going through in a personal way, without having it be the blog I started for the two of us, so enter stage left, theywereborndragons.com.

The concept behind They Were Born Dragons is still really important to me, but I am probably not going to continue it. Now I need a place to write about my house’s transformation and mine. I need a place to be 100% myself without worrying about saying something I shouldn’t that might hurt someone else. I have reflected on the experience of writing TWBD blog and I have made some boundary rules for myself.

People don’t need every detail. A lot of important and necessary and soul-connecting story can happen even when you share just the gist of the story. I’m not going to drag my last relationship(s) through the mud, for example. That’s not my style anyway and I will always send peace and love toward Tom. After experiencing some grey areas in the last year with a blog where I talked about my personal life and professional life, I think it is wise to keep my privacy more. If you are someone in the inner sphere of my life, I can tell you my nitty-gritty in person. I’m going old school with the intimate personal stuff-catch me in the analog to be face to face or in the phone realm and we’ll rock it like 1990.

I hope this makes sense to my readers. As a blogger, it was kind of crazy to stop writing on TWBD because I had 200+ followers and thousands of monthly views. For most bloggers that’s super small potatoes, but for me, it was my most followed site I’d ever written. I’ve been writing blogs on various platforms online for about 18 years, but TWBD was by far the most read, in part because of other social media like Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook.

I am going to write a book. That is my ultimate goal, and none of my blogs are disappearing because they are archives of my writing. I am going to put my whole heart into Jenny and Lucy, and this is where my eventual book will be born from.

Please follow my blog through wordpress, and please tell people about it.

Most publishers won’t even look at your manuscript these days unless you have a mailing list and reader list in the 10 thousands. (!!) They want you to already have a following, something that publishers used to help authors build with publisher paid time and marketing 30 years ago. Now, it’s up to the authors to have done their own tribe building before a publishing house takes a chance on them. So, gauntlet thrown down. I am building my tribe.

I love to write. I’m done blog hopping. I hope you’ll follow me.