Writing and Blogging

Today is the 11th anniversary of This Battered Suitcase. I’d be lying if I said that I felt OK about it all, and that I still have the confidence that things would go back to “normal”. It hits me like a ton of bricks a few times a day: the dream job I worked for for almost two decades is gone, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get it back to where it used to be. The last year has brought with it massive waves of anxiety, and on some days, I can’t even turn on my computer, let alone try to write anything meaningful or coherent.

On April 12th, 2010, I sat on my bed in my sunny flat in downtown Osaka, Japan, and I wrote this post. It’s only a few lines long, the photos are edited…

After fifteen years of writing online, I have definitely committed some of the biggest mistakes in travel blogging. Here’s what I did wrong, and what I’ve learned along the way.

The day has finally come. After years (and years) of talking about wanting to both redesign my blog AND fix the ten thousand errors that seemed to plague it… IT IS FINISHED! OK, actually, there is still a lot of work behind the scenes to be done, but for the most part, things are running a lot smoother and are (hopefully) a lot easier to navigate.

It’s one of the most frequently asked questions I get via email, comments, and messages across social media: how do I do what you do? And by what I do, I assume people mean…

Why yes, my workspace DOES always look like it’s straight out of an ethereal Instagram account (only thing missing is my straw hat) and DEFINITELY NOT a scratched IKEA desk with red…