This week marks the first anniversary of my blog. A year ago, I decided to create this blog to help improve my writing and do more of it and share it with the world. Before, my writing was very random and sporadic, and all over the place. I had various pieces saved on my cloud drive and flash drive, and nobody ever saw or read any of it. Not even me. This blog gave my writing a new life and another chance, and most importantly, it gave me an excellent opportunity to write more and write regularly.

I decided to create this blog because I wanted to get my writing out there in the world. Before, in my early days, I was trying to submit as much as possible to various journals and literary publications, and magazines with very little or no success. It could be because it wasn’t any good, or because there were too many submissions to choose from, or because of the content itself, or because what I write is not necessary the pretty and safe writing I’ve seen in so many places. After a few years, I had a few successful submissions, and then I asked myself, why in the fuck am I wasting so much time and effort and money trying to get accepted by some assholes who will decide my future as a writer. I wanted to determine my future as a writer. I didn’t have to wait for someone else’s acceptance.

Looking back at it now, all I needed then was to get at least something accepted and published by another publication, so I could proudly call myself a writer, a poet, or whatever. That moment came, and it was a very proud moment in my life. I was finally happy for a short period of time. After so many efforts, somebody read my work, liked it, and offered to publish one of my poems. Great, mission accomplished. However, that feeling of great success was relatively short-lived, and soon I felt empty again. I mean, it wasn’t enough. I thought that I need to do more, that I need to write more, and for fuck’s sake, I need to stop worrying about being accepted and published. All I needed was to focus on my writing, and work it out, develop my style, work on my poems, craft my lines, develop my sentences, dialogues, prose, all of it. Finally, I was able to write whatever hell I wanted, and it all is published now, here on this blog.