Was I tempting fate by launching my first website on the Ides of March twenty years ago today? Just two years prior, I composed “Ides of March” after experiencing driving through a flood in Houston. It was so horrific that I had to rush back to my loft apartment to write the lyrics and the music in one go.
What propelled me to launch my first website? What has happened since?
Twenty years ago, I had three goals in mind.
As stated on the home page of my website, it was a platform for self-expression. Desperate to express myself, I challenged myself to writing and publishing my diary online every single day for an entire year. This became the 365 daily entries of The Diary of Anne Ku. My next project was Le Bon Journal. And then Concertblog.
I began blogging before the word “blog” was invented. By challenging myself to write online every single day, I forced myself to write. My first diary entry mentioned my motivation for writing. In response to my request to attend a natural gas conference in London, my boss at that time said to me, “Do you think anyone would want to talk to you if you didn’t work for us?” In other words, “you’re not important enough to attend a conference.” I felt small and unimportant but attributed to her rhetorical question to a symptom of a workaholic.
Over the years, I expressed myself not only through blogging, composing, and performing music but also launching projects that involved the community. I’d get an idea and realise it by collaborating with others. These days, I use social media tools to create, promote, and manage my events.
So the website was a platform for self-expression but also a portal for logging stories from my travels and my untiring pursuit of flexibility. I nearly forgot that I had outlined a book on flexibility or the many other book outlines and manuscripts lost in the last twenty years!