What was going to be a short break to study Python and data science became a three year absence. I wanted to combine data science with the publishing industry on this blog but it was a struggle; not because data science and publishing don’t go together but because I didn’t know enough to do the things I wanted to do and I get very nervous about presenting anything that is less than perfect. (heyyyy Beyonce, I see you.) I missed writing about writing and reading and storytelling to help others get a foothold in the publishing industry but after a while, I felt less like a disappointment for having a dormant blog and very minimal work as a freelance editor.

All of that changed in October of 2020, when I was accepted into Udacity’s Pledge for Equality scholarship, specifically the Data Scientist Nanodegree, because the first project is a data science blog post. I am currently working on that post and I will be posting it soon. I was allowed to choose my own dataset for it, so I am taking a look at a GoodReads dataset I grabbed from Kaggle user jealousleopard.

This program gave me a jumping off point to start blogging again, but to do that I had to update my website, which was a feat. Don’t let your website sit fallow for three years. It’s a bad idea. I updated the PHP, choose a new theme, got an SSL certificate and upgraded the website to HTTPS, and most recently figure out why all of the pages looked linked in the WordPress theme but broken on the actual site. (I did the “turn off your plugins” troubleshooting and I don’t know which one of the plugins I wasn’t using was causing the issue but we’re back in business now, huzzah.)

Now that I’ve done all the maintenance to get the website back up to functional, I’m working on rebranding from a freelance editor to a literary data scientist. I’m very excited for this new start but I also feel like a failure over quitting freelance editing. The reasons for putting the freelance editor hat in a hatbox are good: I won’t have time to work my day job, keep up with my studies, and building (hopefully) rad shit that will help writers from marginalized communities get their stories published— but I want to acknowledge that even though I’m putting down something that no longer serves me and embracing something that excites me, I feel like I’m a quitter and a failure and an impostor.

So this post is to all the disappointments I’ve been: a failed travel writer, a failed editorial assistant, and a continually failing fiction writer. Keep going because eventually you’ll (probably) get through the obstacle course.