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Hi everyone! If you don’t know me, my name is Karissa, and I’m a writer who just graduated from college. If you do know me, then yep, I’m back on WordPress. This isn’t going to be a personal journal, though I might write about what’s going on in my life every now and then. I created this blog for two reasons:

1. I needed somewhere to organize samples of my writing for potential employers and freelance clients. The easiest way to do that was to set up my own Web site (writing it like that is AP style, by the way — the stylebook also insisted “teenager” was hyphenated for a while before it finally caught up). Also, I’m part of Generation Y, and we’re supposed to be all over Web 2.0. I signed up for Twitter recently, too, but I’m not sure what I’ll ever write there.
2. I want to keep writing for myself. This doesn’t mean that I don’t want this blog to be interesting and informative for others. It just means that now that I’m looking to get paid for doing what I love, I don’t want to lose my enjoyment of it by writing only what I’m told to write. Writing continuously would also help me break through writers’ block. For me, getting started is the hardest part of any project. It’ll be easier for the words to flow if I never let them stop for long.

There are some handy links to the right where you can subscribe via e-mail or an RSS reader, so please click on them if you want to keep up with me.

As I’ve been looking for freelance opportunities, I’ve noticed that it pays to specialize. The common wisdom for professional bloggers is to find a “niche” — a small, concentrated area of focus. Other freelance writers become experts in a field and then write about it for magazines and Web sites. But I’m a generalist, not a specialist. I’m interested in music, movies, TV, photography, religion, politics, computers, video games, philosophy and current events — just to name a few broad topics. I love to learn a lot about all kinds of things, but I’ve never really immersed myself in one of them. Writing may be the only exception, and lately I’ve been applying that to a field I highly respect — journalism. At least there’s still a need for general assignment reporters!

If I start naturally gravitating toward a few topics, I’ll try to delve into them further, and I may gain some expertise and find a specialty. But for now, I just want to explore.

I have a question for you, whether you know me or not: What should I write about? Is there a certain topic you think I should look into? Something interesting you saw in the news? A weird question I could research? Comments are always welcome – discussion is more interesting than monologue, and it also makes me look good. I’m still free to choose what I want to write, so this doesn’t go against my second purpose above. I’d just love some ideas!

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