I started writing with my own words in high school, with my life-long friend Naci. We were in a boarding school, it was not a Hogwarts but it was OK. We had plenty of time to talk about things from girls in the school to poetry, science, meaning of life. You name it.
As we started to prepare for university entrance exam in Turkey, I stopped writing. Because it was time and energy consuming to write poems about loove, you know :) Well, to be honest, it paid off for me to focus on making a good score on the exam and thus I got into Electrical & Electronics Engineering program at Boğaziçi University.
The second wave of “urge to write” hit me hard in university. I was surfing online and chatting with friends on MSN Messenger all the time. This time, my another life-long friend Eren (he have already written a book, and continues to write) seduced me. There was an online literature community named SiyahKahve (at sihaykahve.com, currently inactive), which means “Black Coffee” in Turkish. I started to be an active member of the community by both writing and being one of the community managers. The community was great but my life quality was going down, I was too much into it. I also started and closed several blogs in the mean time. My semester GPA went really down, as you can see the beautiful dip in my SPA & GPA graph :)
Then, real life happened, and I stopped writing. I wasn’t really aware of the fact that writing online is an industry and people were making real money from it.
I graduated from university and started changing jobs between government agencies and a defence industry company. I was kind of in a career path that was expected from an engineer in Turkey. But I was tempted by the Internet and its power to connect not just people, but also ideas, businesses, even governments. I had to jump into Internet industry.
I made a crazy thing, left my well-paid job with high job security in defense industry and landed a job at an Internet startup in August 2013. Working longer hours for a job with a lower salary and much lower job security seemed highly unreasonable to my relatives and close friends, whereas I was happier with my new job. I finally got on a track in my career path where I worked on what I am mostly interested in.
The third wave of urge to write came with my new career path: there are lots of people writing blogs about what they do best, what they care about, what they have things to shout out to the world. And it was really helping them to create an online presence and authority. Once again, I opened my blog.
I haven’t made money out of my blog, but I had a free ticket for a conference by writing a review about the past year’s conference, thanks Yiğit for the free ticket :).
I started to write a couple of blog posts on the things I leverage at work. But more than writing, I’ve been reading blog posts and e-books. I’ve written a couple of drafts, but never allocated energy to finish and publish them.
On the edge of forgetting my blog completely, I headed up to Jeff Goins’ post about The Secret to Developing a Regular Writing Habit and jumped into 31-day writing challenge he offers.
Just writing, and not looking back is such a relief!
Just commenting to let you know, someone is reading your posts:) I am a bit surprised to see no comments have been posted.
Thanks Tuncay for your comment, hope you enjoy my blog :)