From Then Until Now

Today I’d like to go back a little in time. I want to go back to the beginning of this blog and share a little about it with you as I’ve so many new readers now I thought it’d be fun to share.

Back in 2009, we welcomed our first child into the world. By 2010 I knew that I didn’t want to leave her and return to my career.

It was a huge decision, as at the time I was an area manager for a building society and I loved my job and the people. But I loved my daughter more so I searched for something else to do.

I tried a couple of different things before stumbling into blogging in 2013, when our son was a few months old. 

I fell into it all by accident, really. 

I was on Twitter and there was a great blogging community over there, many of whom I chatted with regularly. 

From there, I decided one day that it might be fun to start a blog, and The Reading Residence was born.

I do remember tweeting to get opinions on the name, all those years ago, and I then decided on it within a few hours and got the blog set up and ready to write.

It was a steep learning curve!

Bloggers generally have to figure out a lot of different things and become ‘experts’ in things they’ve never tried before.

From understanding how to use WordPress to navigating Pinterest to starting to use Instagram to uploading to YouTube to creating graphics to working out how to get traffic, the list goes on and on. 

I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are harder jobs! My previous career was nothing like this and challenging, but blogging is quite a solitary thing to do so most things are self taught and can take a while to get a handle on. 

When I first blogged, I blogged every day. Every single day. About a huge range of things. 

I think I first started ‘Bring Back Paper’ a year or so into blogging, so it has been around for a while. And wow, has it grown?!

Bring Back Paper is the cornerstone of what I do here now and I love it.

It is no longer the weekly papery post that it began as, it’s now a YouTube channel, monthly swaps, monthly book readalongs, an ever-growing Facebook group, Patreon memberships, an Etsy store and at the heart of it all, it’s a community of lovely people. 

I still love to blog about whatever I fancy blogging about, so I share a papery post every Wednesday and then whatever comes to mind every Monday. 

After all this time, I still like to write. I think that remains my favourite thing to this day.

I then love how it’s grown and developed and I get to do so many other things too.

Whether it be filming or designing products, no day is the same and as there are so many different elements to what I do now, I can work on the thing that I am most in the mood for that day.

This suits me perfectly, I am one of those jack of all trades, master of none type of people. I adore variety so having so many elements to this business is great for me. 

And I guess that’s where we are today.

A few different strings all pulling together and giving me something to do every day! 

I love it, I am proud of it and I want to say thanks to everyone who reads posts, follows and chats on social media, watches my videos, has fun over on Patreon with us or buys from my Etsy store. 

And whilst I am happy with all of it, I think it’s the wonderful Bring Back Paper community that really keeps me going.

When you tell me that having a pen pal has made a huge difference to you, when you tell me that you’re cheered up taking part in the swaps, when you tell me that you love the Facebook group and connecting with others, all of those types of comments motivate me to do more. So thanks. It means a lot to me, thank you for sharing with me. 

Where we go from here remains to be seen.

Who knows? 

And that’s the exciting thing for me. 

Thanks for coming on the journey with me so far, whether that be from 2013 or last week. Stick around and we’ll see where we go next. 

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