Today I am retiring my “calm within” twitter handle and blog site. I’ve had a good run with “calm within”. It began back in 2009 when I had a spiritual reawakening. I started reading all sorts of metaphysical type books. I would save quotes I read from these books for future reference and inspiration. Then I discovered twitter. Why not post quotes that were meaningful to me through this new form of internet communication? But I didn’t want anyone to know who I was, so I created my “calm within” identity and posted tweets under that! I found other people liked the same quotes I did, and I was very surprised when my twitter following grew into the 1000’s.
I’ve always enjoyed writing, having kept a personal journal for years. In 2010 I decided to start a blog to go along with my “calm within” twitter handle – naturally called calmwithin.com. In a bold move I decided to associate my real name to my blog and twitter handle, but still keep that calmwithin identity. Early in 2011 I saw a facebook post from Wayne Dyer asking for bloggers to review books for Hay House. Would they accept a new blogger into the program? I wasn’t sure, but applied anyway, and I was accepted! I received free books to read in the area of spirituality and personal growth, a passion of mine, in exchange for reviews posted on my blog and on Amazon. A good deal! To date I have reviewed 29 books for Hay House, and I am listed as one of their top reviewers on their “book nook” site. Soon I started getting requests to review books from other publishers and authors, too, which I was glad to do.
As I continued my blogging I thought, what’s the next step for me as a writer? Why not publish a book? I attended a Hay House Writer’s Workshop in 2012, and learned much about creating a book proposal and the ins and outs of the publishing business. I’m working on that first book, and hope to have it published in the next year.
One suggestion made by Reid Tracy, the CEO of Hay House, at the Writer’s Workshop was for an author to have a web page and twitter id with his or her own name. Hmmm – that’s an idea! I have played with that concept for the last few months, and today timlarison.com and my new twitter handle, TimLarison, are born.
I’ve populated this blog with all my book reviews and material I’ve written on calmwithin.com in the last three years. The TimLarison twitter page contains all my “calmwithin’ tweets. But timlarison.com and twitter handle will be more than a spiritual musings – I want to write about other topics meaningful to me, too, like travel. I would post some non-spiritual topics on calmwithin.com periodically but they didn’t seem to fit in with that blog heading – timlarison.com is a much better fit for anything I want to write.
Another motivation for this new blog and twitter handle is for me to be authentic – to show people who I really am. Your comments are welcome on this blog, and look for more frequent blog posts in the future. Goodbye calm within – you served me well.