About Me

This is the story of my blogging career.

I never thought of becoming a tennis blogger, until I actually became one. I wrote a long passage of text on a message board, then I tried to post it in the comments section of some blogs to get people to read it. A couple of days later, I was sent an email asking whether I'd want to write for the blog Tennis Diary. I needed a couple of days to think about it, then I decided to accept the challenge. The agreement was to write once a week, and that was good for me, because that forced me to keep writing.

After some initial doubts, I started to become more confident of my writing abilities. I received some very positive feedback from some readers, and I started to believe that I could make it as a freelance journalist. I emailed around tennis websites, and despite numerous websites being interested in allowing me to contribute some articles for free, I found getting paid was much more difficult. I also started contributing articles to Sportingo in the attempt to get more readers. I had already emailed around all relevant contacts, so I left it at that, and decided to see tennis writing as recreation from now on.

The more articles I wrote, the more I noticed what my strengths in writing were, so the blog quickly turned to focus on the technicalities of the sport. I became very good at writing "profiles" of players, pointing out aspects of tennis players that make them unique, strong or weak. It was the antithesis to all of the fashion and gossip blogs, picture-oriented blogs, news-oriented blogs, statistics-oriented blogs, overly informal blogs (all in the realm of tennis, I mean). Also, the blog is not as focused on the top players, instead covering a variety of players in the top 100.

I guess what makes my writing different is that I typically take a detailed and complete approach. It's one of my personal strengths (not just in writing, but in general) and I seem to like to show it off as much as I can. However, writing articles like that also means that I can't write as frequently as some other bloggers so I'll probably never be able to build up a following.

The challenge from here on in, is to try to write less one-dimensional articles, and to write articles that are suited to a wider variety of tastes.