Re-introducing Cultural Life

I have been blogging since 2011 (has it really been that long?) and I have learnt a lot about blogging and my aims for Cultural Life since then. However, I think there is always more to learn and so I decided to begin my blogging year in 2014 with the Daily Post’s “Zero to Hero: 30 Days to a Better Blog” challenge.

My regular readers already know me pretty well but for those of you who are new to Cultural Life, day 1 of the Zero to Hero challenge starts with a question-and-answer introduction. Hello and welcome!

Why are you blogging, rather than keeping a personal journal?

I started blogging to share my thoughts and writing with others and to meet other bloggers who share similar interests with me. I think an important part of blogging is about taking part in a community and that is one of the reasons why I started blogging via the WordPress platform. It feels so inclusive and welcoming!

What topics do you think you’ll write about?

After much deliberation and consideration I chose the name, Cultural Life, because I wanted it to be broad enough to give me scope but still give a sense of what my blog is about. Culture can be interpreted in many different ways and it means different things to different people.

Merriam-Webster contains several definitions of “culture”, including the “acquaintance with and taste in fine arts, humanities, and broad aspects of science as distinguished from vocational and technical skills” (Merriam-Webster). That neatly sums up my principal blogging topics. I write about books (I am a keen reader), language and linguistic science (my passion), movies and cinema, travel, food and other aspects of culture. Sometimes I write fiction, although that tends to be infrequent.

Here’s a pretty picture of somewhere I visited last year (Scone Palace in Scotland). Because all text and no pictures in a blog post isn’t fun.

Who would you love to connect with via your blog?

I am open-minded but I enjoy connecting with other people who share my enthusiasm for discovering new things: new books, new films, new recipes… I love good book and travel blogs.

If you blog successfully throughout 2014, what would you hope to have accomplished?

Well, I would love to be featured on Freshly Pressed again. One of my posts was Freshly Pressed in February 2013 and it was so exciting. I was thrilled and the response from readers was wonderful!

Failing that, I would be very happy to achieve my goal of posting a minimum of one post per week. Also, I would like to increase active participation in my blog, for example, through readers’ comments. I have come a long way since I started writing in 2011 and now I rarely receive zero comments on my posts but it is always great, as a blogger, to know that your writing is actually reaching someone’s eyes and not simply floating unread in a blank void!

Thank you for reading and if you are a new reader, I hope you will stick around!