After a couple months of poking around on the internet, looking for a place to write, to work with other writers and to share my love of words, I felt defeated. I had joined a few sites that operate on a “pitch to me” or “write about one of these pitches” basis and I found it discouraging. It seems like anymore, if you’d like to write for a site with a lot of traffic you have to mold your style into another. If I wanted to write about feminism, I should probably pitch a listicle to get it picked up. “5 Feminist Thoughts I Have On the Daily” just doesn’t satisfy me like a personal essay would. On another site that pays per post (yay!) I am given prompts like “I secretly hate my kids” or “Cheating is fun.” I can’t write about these topics and even if I could I wouldn’t.

If I wanted to write about books, I can’t because it is a topic that’s overdone. If I want to write about love, I have to bare intimate details that would make readers gasp or else it’s too vanilla. Anymore, the content doesn’t seem to matter much. Every idea is turned into a list, narratives are passed over and thought provoking essays’ aren’t accepted unless you’re talking about something that will cause controversial comments.

And I have learned that I don’t fit in that box. What good is a platform to write on if you aren’t writing what you feel and instead are tailoring your words to appeal to an editor that is more worried about clicks than content?

So, here we are. Somewhere in Siena was born and the scary and daunting task of starting my own site was thought of and running in the same day. This site will not be a diary, I will not be sharing with you the events of my week or what I thought of last weeks episode of Game of Thrones (well, maybe once in a while). My vision for this site is content rich essays mixed with fashion, travel, books and lipstick. I want to talk about wine with you, traveling with you, reading with you and everything in between.

Who knows where this will go. The end doesn’t interest me much. I care about the journey and I hope there isn’t an end. I would love if this site turned into a place for other writers to come and share their stories, where friends are made and important topics are discussed. But for now, I look forward to writing. Writing for myself, most importantly, for those that enjoy my writing secondly, and for anyone else that stumbles through the interweb and lands somewhere in Siena.

Arrivederci-

R