I know what you're thinking. ANOTHER BLOG BY JANNA?! What's new honestly? I think I have gone through 10 blogs during my lifetime on the internet, with 4 of them being public, and 1 of them being a Tumblr (so not a true blog but kinda sorta?)
My last blog, Skyline Soul (RIP), was my last ambitious passion project and a testament to why I could never be a true blogger. Listicle and article writing were not meant for me. The fun seemed to seep out from the looming pressure to gain as much traffic as possible and build a business out of something I wasn't even so sure about.
So I stopped feeling passionate about writing and took a break to pursue other projects. I wrote, filmed, and edited my own short film, which became a finalist at a Los Angeles film festival. That led me to producing one of my friend's short films, which is currently in post-production right now. I was surprisingly promoted into a job I never thought I would actually get, and to be honest, it has made me uncertain about my career path. So I took up more hobbies to satisfy my curiosities and creative musings -- consistent bullet journaling, photography, building content for a Fil-Am content platform, editing and filming content for friends, etc. TLDR; I stopped writing for awhile.
But something always take me back to writing. When I think about what my life's purpose is, I think back to when I was a driven, overzealous student in high school who had read so many YA and fantasy novels that I basically kept my own library. I was just barely getting into videography and filmmaking, but did not actually understand what that all meant. I didn't care because I knew I was working towards my biggest dream -- to write novels and adapt them into film.
The thing about dreams is that they can easily fade over time. Slowly, that dream molded itself into other reiterations of being a creative in entertainment and media. I thought about being a DP, an editor, a screenwriter, even a YouTube creator. Now I have shifted into becoming a producer, which I think blends my creative and logistic/admin skills together beautifully. But writing fiction and blogs about the human condition and experience continue to trickle into my mind. And I miss it so much. After a lot of self-reflection and meditation, I finally learned what my life passion is: to tell creative stories that inspire, influence, and inform others of the human condition and the state of the world using different mediums. Different mediums. I can't subject myself to JUST films and video. One of my pillars in life was education and reading, so books and writing are just as important to me as the films and videos I grew up with.
So this is the birth of The Unfiltered Cafe. A casual blog where I write about pretty much anything I want --all unfiltered and probably written in a cafe (I'm in a K-Town cafe as I write this). Mostly I see myself writing think pieces (with some Janna humor sprinkled in) about my life, travels, minimalism, self-development, and character development exercises for short story/short film ideas I have that take space in my brain. This space is basically fair game for any creative writing I can think of. I'd love to have an audience, although I don't expect it in the way that I did for Skyline Soul. This is all going to be completely organic, and if people are drawn to my writing and opinions, I at least want it to be because they were genuinely curious about my work and not because they were served an ad in the interwebs. But we will see where this goes! It might be another list to the many abandoned blogs I have created, but I want to embody my dreamy high school self and hope that this makes an impact in a small way, whether that be for myself and my writing, or if it resonates with someone out there.
We can't know unless we try.
My last blog, Skyline Soul (RIP), was my last ambitious passion project and a testament to why I could never be a true blogger. Listicle and article writing were not meant for me. The fun seemed to seep out from the looming pressure to gain as much traffic as possible and build a business out of something I wasn't even so sure about.
So I stopped feeling passionate about writing and took a break to pursue other projects. I wrote, filmed, and edited my own short film, which became a finalist at a Los Angeles film festival. That led me to producing one of my friend's short films, which is currently in post-production right now. I was surprisingly promoted into a job I never thought I would actually get, and to be honest, it has made me uncertain about my career path. So I took up more hobbies to satisfy my curiosities and creative musings -- consistent bullet journaling, photography, building content for a Fil-Am content platform, editing and filming content for friends, etc. TLDR; I stopped writing for awhile.
But something always take me back to writing. When I think about what my life's purpose is, I think back to when I was a driven, overzealous student in high school who had read so many YA and fantasy novels that I basically kept my own library. I was just barely getting into videography and filmmaking, but did not actually understand what that all meant. I didn't care because I knew I was working towards my biggest dream -- to write novels and adapt them into film.
The thing about dreams is that they can easily fade over time. Slowly, that dream molded itself into other reiterations of being a creative in entertainment and media. I thought about being a DP, an editor, a screenwriter, even a YouTube creator. Now I have shifted into becoming a producer, which I think blends my creative and logistic/admin skills together beautifully. But writing fiction and blogs about the human condition and experience continue to trickle into my mind. And I miss it so much. After a lot of self-reflection and meditation, I finally learned what my life passion is: to tell creative stories that inspire, influence, and inform others of the human condition and the state of the world using different mediums. Different mediums. I can't subject myself to JUST films and video. One of my pillars in life was education and reading, so books and writing are just as important to me as the films and videos I grew up with.
So this is the birth of The Unfiltered Cafe. A casual blog where I write about pretty much anything I want --all unfiltered and probably written in a cafe (I'm in a K-Town cafe as I write this). Mostly I see myself writing think pieces (with some Janna humor sprinkled in) about my life, travels, minimalism, self-development, and character development exercises for short story/short film ideas I have that take space in my brain. This space is basically fair game for any creative writing I can think of. I'd love to have an audience, although I don't expect it in the way that I did for Skyline Soul. This is all going to be completely organic, and if people are drawn to my writing and opinions, I at least want it to be because they were genuinely curious about my work and not because they were served an ad in the interwebs. But we will see where this goes! It might be another list to the many abandoned blogs I have created, but I want to embody my dreamy high school self and hope that this makes an impact in a small way, whether that be for myself and my writing, or if it resonates with someone out there.
We can't know unless we try.
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