With 2021 carrying on very much like 2020 I’ve tried to set myself some personal challenges. One of which is to get blogging more and I thought I’d sign up to the WordPress.com ‘Blogging for Beginners’ course while it was discounted this month.
I’ve been doing this blog on and off since 2016 and I thought doing the course would be a good way of motivating myself more and improving the content.
One of the first tasks is to write an introductory post. I did do a brief introduction way back at the start – but it doesn’t hurt to revisit, rethink, and evaluate why I’m doing this blog.
Why do I blog?
I’d like to think that I’m writing the type of blog that I would like to read. I love travel, film and television, and history. Finding a filming location either by chance or intentionally ticks a lot of my boxes. I remember enjoying visiting castles and historic sites a child and using my imagination to picture what these places would have been like in their prime. That’s not much different to visualising a castle or location used in a film. I’m not unique – there’s a whole tourism industry devoted to locations, Visit England for example has a section promoting places https://www.visitengland.com/things-to-do/literature-film-and-tv
Film tourism rather fascinates me, and I’ve been impressed to see it’s even being studied academically. There are even companies like FilmQuest https://www.filmquest.co/ set up to provide a consultation service to film productions considering filming on location.
What do I blog about?
I generally plan to cover places I’ve visited over my travels that have some link to film, television or even books. It’s a way of reminiscing and celebrating fabulous and unusual places that I’m been to. I hope that some of my posts encourage others to visit places I’ve been or learn something they didn’t know about an area. I’ve seen that a few visitors to my site have found it via a search engine so hopefully I’m writing about places other people are curious about.
Who would I like to connect with?
Fellow location hunters, sci-fi fans, anyone! It’s rather nice to see some footfall on the site when I look at the statistics – makes me happy that I’m not just posting into an empty void.
I was originally inspired by these bloggers who I actually met many years ago at Cardiff Comic Con – Fangirl Quest, they had a stall at the convention and I stopped to chat https://www.fangirlquest.com/ They’ve travelled the world and visited some amazing locations.
What do I want to accomplish in the future?
I’d like to have a regular update pattern, posting at least once a month. Nothing worse than finding a blog I like only to find it’s not been updated in ages.
Lack of travel opportunities due to the Covid-19 pandemic has limited new trips but I have a surprisingly large back catalogue to work through that could keep me busy for a while. I’ve not even touched on the Lord of the Rings locations I visited in New Zealand. So, this blog also serves as a diary of my travels too.
I’d like to occasionally focus on some of the lesser known and unexpected places used for locations. For example, watching the 2019 Keira Knightly film ‘Official Secrets’ I spotted somewhere that looked vaguely familiar, and it turns out a scene set in Iraq was actually a glass factory just down the road from me in St Helens, Merseyside. I’d like to big up the North West of England as it’s always appearing in shows and films. The fabulous Russell T Davies show that’s just been release ‘It’s a Sin’ is set in London but it uses places familiar to me in Liverpool and Bolton to double for the capital (and in the case of Liverpool it was New York as well!)
Finally, I’d like my blog to help me and my readers remember that there is a big beautiful world out there and that we’ll be back to bouncing around it soon.
Thank you for reading!
From scene to seen 