My raison d’être of becoming a blogger almost three years ago was simple: I needed a place to tell stories about food and what I knew about the restaurant business. My blog wasn’t created to change the world. It was built to describe it.
Because my goal for this website wasn’t to become The World’s Most Popular Food Blogger, or make millions off of advertising, there have been a lots of things I don’t do. I don’t use a computer program to tell me how to search engine optimize my posts for key words. I don’t write about topics I think will gain me advertisers’ dollars or corporate clients. I don’t go to blogging dinners just to get free meals. What I do is write. I write about things that fascinate me and make me want to learn more. I celebrate the underdogs. I enjoy the company of passionate people. I participate in this blogging world in order to participate in a virtual salon on food and expression.
I do, however, come from a background of acting and doing improvisational comedy. My training in saying YES to every challenge I’m faced with makes it very hard to to ignore the voice I have inside me that demands I do things that are well beyond my comfort zone. This internal voice—the quiet champion’s whisper that said it was a good idea to quit my job as a screenwriter and take up blogging—often asks me to do things that scare the hell out of me. Things like auditioning for food shows, speak at conferences, network with big time food bloggers, go after big dreams, and enter myself into food blogging competitions, like Project Food Blog.
In choosing to enter the Project Food Blog competition—an ten week competition to see who would be the Next Food Blogging Star and something that I’ve been writing about for the past month—I decided to take a chance on myself because it would push me to be the best I could be under unusual circumstances. I knew the competition would be a difficult and full of impossible deadlines, odd tests of skill, trials of character, and tests of stamina. I learned there was a certain amount of campaigning involved, and while I tried to ignore the feeling of competing in a popularity contest—I enjoyed discovering the voices of other food lovers and writers.