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My Journey to Wattpad

As I recall, it all began when my younger sister walked into the bedroom that we share and said, “You know what? You should start a blog.”

It was the summer of 2012, I had just completed my second year of college, and I had a good deal of free time to spend. Although I don’t remember exactly what I was doing that moment when she walked in, I was probably either playing around on my laptop or reading a book. I do those things a lot.

I looked at her and asked, “What would I write a blog about?”

“You could write it about reading the 1001 books,” she replied.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is a book edited by Peter Boxall, which compiles a list of 1001 of the greatest and most influential books ever written. The title itself offers the challenge at hand: can you read them all? I had discovered this book thanks to a website called LibraryThing, which acts as an online catalog for your personal library as well as providing a number of clubs and discussion boards in which members group around common interests and hold conversations. I joined the site after reading an article about it in Writer’s Digest magazine, and I found the club dedicated to reading the 1001 books while I was exploring it one day.

This was back in 2010, just after I had started attending college. I had already declared my writing major, and I was intent on doing everything possible to hone my skills. I’ve also had an intense love of reading since the time I first learned how. I wanted to take that challenge. Fresh from my days of reading nothing but Young Adult literature, I was eager to cut my teeth on the greatest books the world had to offer. I wanted to read them, and I wanted to read them all. Challenge accepted!

By 2012, I had already posted brief reviews of forty-eight books, from Life of Pi to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. As I walked the aisles of the contact lens distribution center where I had a part time job, I found myself considering the conversation I’d had with my sister the previous day. At the time, I had been skeptical, but in between fetching the proper prescriptions of Oasys for Astigmatism and ensuring that the contents of my little cardboard box matched the products called for on the invoice, I began to think that it might be fun to do a blog. Reading, writing, and computers, three of my favorite things brought together into a fun hobby. And so it began.

I wrote a post discussing what the blog would be about, two posts providing an overview of my 1001 journey up to that point, and a review of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, a lesser known work by Philip K. Dick, which, in my opinion, was perfectly deserving of its relative obscurity. I added new posts nearly every day during the month of August, but gradually posted less and less frequently as the demands of college caught up with me again. The demands of college often do.

I was, however, still putting enough time into it that I found myself wishing that I had a few more readers. To be honest, it usually felt as though no one at all was reading it, and, while that was to be expected at first, it became more and more discouraging as months passed.

I came home again at the end of the semester and said, “Caitlin! You should be following my blog!”

It seemed a reasonable request to make of someone who had suggested that I start one in the first place.