What’s the point?

Last night I watched the movie Julie and Julia. I wasn’t particularly aware of the storyline,  but I’m a fan of Amy Adams, and Meryl Streep is just iconic!

Basically the story (based on 2 true stories) is of a girl (Julie) in 2002 deciding to cook all 524 recipes from a cookery book by a writer (Julia Child) from the 50s.

What caught my attention most though was that Julie decided to start the recreation as a challenge to herself,  and document it on a blog. Something that was fairly new and innovative 11 years ago…

She started the blog for no apparent reason other than somewhere to store her thoughts and actions.  Not to garner great praise, freebies, attention.  Just for herself.

Okay so it may have been a Hollywood version of the truth, but back then, it was probably more truth than embellishment.

She did receive negative press at the later stages of her challenge, and in fact Julia Child herself was dismissive of the blog.

And more recently, with the movie, she’s become the recipient of even greater negativity; with people calling her narcissistic among other less favourable terms.

But it did make me wonder why people choose to blog.

Certainly this is relatively new for me, though I’ve been ‘online’ with MAF for over 7 years.

I started this blog to be able to chunter away to myself about my children, my home life, and recently about my crafting.

It was nevrr designed to be a place to get lots of virtual pats on the back, or heaps of praise for things I’d said or done.

Though comments as above are always happily received!

But I’m a great reader of blogs. I read beauty ones because that’s my working industry, crafting ones because that’s my hobby, family ones because I have one and anything else that comes through my hands!

What I used to see a lot of was honesty. Real life reviews of products,  where people actually wrote what they thought, without fear of falling out with a PR.

I used to see mostly personal posts with a smattering of pr gifted products.

I used to be able to really understand the blogger and their personality.

Now not so much.

Granted, it’s a changing time, and certainly in the beauty world, and probably in most othrr industries, brands understand the huge power that bloggers have.

I still have favourite blogs that remain original, honest and not pr driven, and I return to them again and again.

But I have to confess, my favourite type of blog is where someone isn’t scared to say exactly what they think. Isn’t afraid they may lose readers, and is happy to be opinionated on things.

So my homage to Julie Powell who set herself a challenge to recreate 524 recipes in 1 year, is to write a blog post each day with alternating positive and negative reviews, thoughts or opinions. For one year….

I have a new enough blog to be able to do this. I have no brands knocking at my door, I don’t even have a massive readership, I have only me, my mobile phone (that I blog from) and I have an opinion.

So this is my new reason for blogging.

I hope you’ll stick with me through this!

Sam x