The question I’ve been asked the most frequently since I announced my school plans i — Are you excited???

Yes, super excited. Even more so now that I have my house leased out and a place to live once I get there. In fact, I might even be more excited than I am terrified at this point, which is a huge improvement to a month ago.

The second most popular question has undoubtedly been — Are you changing your blog name?

I’m not for several reasons.

It’s a paste tense statement.

I did move to Texas, and that has changed me. Texas has been a huge force on my life, and I don’t really want to break the importance and the association from it. I know this is something I’ll write about more later, but Texas is more than just a place I’ve lived. Moving here was an important point in my life for me, and that won’t change after I move away.

It’s a giant pain in the ass.

If I change the blog name, I’ll have to take a lot of technical steps to avoid any drop in SEO. I actually get a lot of traffic from SEO & referrals (Pinterest, etc), so I’d have to keep this domain maintained with a redirect to the new site. I’d have to move stuff over. I’d have to think of a new blog name (worst). I don’t live under the pretense that I’m a famous internet writer or anything like that, but those who do know and associate me with this domain name would be confused.

So I’m keeping the blog name, but I am changing direction just a little bit.

I plan to continue blogging through this next chapter of my life, although I don’t know what kind of frequency that will mean. Really I see no future where I don’t keep this site up. It’s become a place where I tell my personal stories. Those stories range from grief, horses, dating, dogs… really anything. I’m keeping SMTT as my place to be me. Gone are the days where I’m going to write tack reviews and opinion pieces about the greater horse world. It’s not the space for that anymore. This blog is my little selfish corner. I invite you along with me, but that’s the direction it has been and will continue to go.

Starting school is the beginning in what I consider to be an earnest attempt to change my career to writing professionally. In the early stages of that, I’ve taken on some other blogging roles to expand my audience and gain experience cultivating content for other platforms.

Even though I won’t be writing equine editorials or greater horse world content here anymore, I am currently doing that kind of work for Jumper Nation. There I plan to write pieces ranging from personal essays to editorials. I’m going to keep writing about Simon on this blog, but if it’s a topic that has a greater audience appeal — I’ll be posting it to JN.

In addition to contributing to Jumper Nation, I’ve been selected as a writer for a creative writing graduate school blog called The MFA Years. This is a site created for aspiring and current MFA students who want to study some variety of creative writing. There I’ll be writing about my choices to go to school and my experiences studying at UC Riverside. I’m not sure they’ll be as much audience cross-over from here to MFA years as there will be to JN, but I will share my posts through my She Moved to Texas Facebook Page as they are published.

So that’s the blogging scoop! I’ll still be here writing about the things I feel like writing about, but I’ll also be other places too. Basically, my goal in life moving forward is that you can’t hit the internet without finding my words somewhere. 😉 A few steps closer to living the dream!

You may also like:

Blog Hop – What’s In Your Name? Why Do I Still Blog? Filling My Blogging Bucket So You Want to Blog? – Part V: Traffic What Makes a Good Horse Blog (to me)