01 - reboot
There’s always an origin story to begin.
After almost 20 years of blogging, stopping, and then restarting, an origin story seems like a reasonable path to take. So here it is.
Anyone out there remember Geocities? A little place found on the still-in-diapers internet where you could build your own home in cyberspace with a bunch of basic HTML code. Well, I had that. A million years ago. I always tried to find a name for my space and it went through a couple of trials (Beyond the Realm, The Faerie’s Realm) until I found the perfect name. And one year my (now) husband purchased that name as gift to me, and it’s been my internet name ever since. Beyond Elsewhere.
So even though I had a cyberspace home since the late 90s, BeyondElsewhere became my home in 2003. I kept that little HTML space for a while as I started blogging on blogpot/blogger, and then wordpress in 2005. That wordpress blog was around forever until this past fall when I let it go and moved over to Squarespace. I was going to import the 16 years of posts over, but I felt like I wanted to start fresh and find a new direction for Beyond Elsewhere.
In 2007 (I think) I branched out with a companion blog - BeyondBooks - which was solely for book reviews. I had been mixing them in my main blog for a while and noticed that there was a community out there for book bloggers and did that for a while. It was fun. I made some great friends, found so many great reads, but then it all became too much to manage while also working full time, and just navigating life on a daily basis. The older I got the less free time I had. And it’s not like I DID anything exciting outside of work and home. I ended up merging BeyondBooks back into Beyond Elsewhere.
Life went on and up and down and up and I felt as though I had less headspace to randomly jot musings down online. Most of my “posting” was being done on instagram and it felt easier.
But I missed my little cyberhome and I missed getting to write about random musings and book reviews.
After the pandemic hit and we were both job hunting for a long time, I had a mild flirtation with opening an Etsy shop to sell stickers and art I was making. But I didn’t like that platform much at all and figured there had to be a way that I could combine blogging, book reviewing, and potential shop sales into one place. So here I am.
Will I have a shop portion on this space? That remains to be seen. I haven’t decided what I want to do with that yet.
Will I have book reviews? Maybe. I have some ideas of what I want to do with that, but I admit I do not find the squarespace platform very user-friendly, and I can’t seem to get it to look anything like how I want it to look.
Will I be blogging? Hopefully yes. Setting myself a goal of one post a week might be a little too ambitious, but I might try. It may end up being twice a month, but I hope to find a topic to write about for each one. Sort of like a column.
For instance, I have wanted to write about our move to Kingston, ON from outside of Montreal, QC since we got here in spring 2020… the timing of which sucked because that’s exactly when everything shut down due to the pandemic. I have been struggling with my mental health ever since and the idea of putting anything in writing has been exhausting before it even begins.
For now, I have this placeholder first post. A rebooting of BeyondElsewhere as it has always been into something that will likely be ever-evolving going forward. You are more than welcome to come on this journey with me. Or simply say goodbye to the old version of BE that you’ve known for almost 2 decades.
