Until about three years ago, I had previously heard of people blogging and vlogging, but I never really knew what it was all about. On YouTube, the only videos I ever really watched were music videos people made using clips of movies and tv shows. I had never really ventured into the vlogging side of YouTube (Well, other than the vlogbrothers).
That is, until I started watching a nerd game show called The King of the Nerds. For those who don’t know, it was basically a nerd version of reality game shows like Big Brother. I absolutely loved the idea of a game show being about all things nerdy (therefore, giving real life nerds their chance to shine on primetime), and I was instantly hooked. One of the challenges they had to do was each team had to create a song celebrating nerd culture, and my favorite of the two teams created an awesome rap song (that I still have in my itunes to this day). My favorite of the contestants, Danielle, in the rap said:
“I’m the queen of YouTube
I get millions of views
Using my nerdy skills
To write, star, and produce
All the trolls out there
Would love to see me tank
But I’m laughing at them
All the way to the bank”
It continued on from there, but that part had me curious, so I went and looked her up. I saw that in addition to TradeChat, her World of Warcraft news channel, she also had a vlog channel. I was so intrigued by the idea of someone sharing videos of themselves just talking about anything and everything that I ended up going back and watching all of her vlogs up to that point.
From then on, the idea of vlogging had a hold of me. I started following more and more vloggers, and started planning a channel of my own. I posted a few small random vlogs on the channel that I previously had only really used for making playlists of my favorite videos. I went back and watched them a couple of weeks back, and oh man…..
The lighting was bad, the angle was horrible, I was so awkward at talking in general much less to a camera, and that was back before I really learned how to put on makeup, so I didn’t even have that to help out. Overall the quality was just really bad.
THANKFULLY, when I decided to start what is now my main channel, I decided I was going to really sit down see what I wanted the channel to look like and be about. This was also when I decided I needed to get an original Internet Handle that didn’t have any random numbers in it that I would use across platforms to really brand myself. It took me a while before I finally settled on Eevylynn. It is a play on my middle name “Evelyn” and my love of Eeveelutions (from Pokémon). Originally, it was two separate names “Eevy Lynn”, but I’ve since just combine them into the one.
With that in mind, I started Eevylynn as a place where I would review the show Once Upon a Time. I was originally going to do them by myself, but I was still so nervous about talking to a camera by myself, that my husband agreed to join in. Viewers loved the back and forth we had going between us, so it became an ongoing thing that the two of us would continue to review the show together.
It’s now been about year and a half since my first video on that channel, and so much has changed. I was laid off back in November thanks to the downswinging economy in my area, so I’ve had a lot more time to dedicate to building my channel among other things. We still post our Once Upon a Time reviews, but that’s not all the channel has anymore. We now have videos where we try foods from other countries. With my pregnancy, I started doing pregnancy vlogs. I even started doing reaction videos to trailers and sneak peeks (though those, I’m probably going to start doing less of…we’ll see). I’ve even been posting more and more just random vlogs similar to the ones that had gotten me into this whole vlogger thing in the first place.
In addition to working on my YouTube channel, I’ve been working on designing on the side to post to my RedBubble, and I’ve been building up an inventory to start posting on etsy as well. I’m also planning to start yet another channel as of this summer (which I will post details to as it gets closer), and I have a potential third channel that may be an even further distanced possibility as well.
With all of this in mind, I figured it would be best to have a central hub of sorts for all of my different sites and projects that isn’t just a Facebook fanpage. That’s when I had the idea for this site. I wasn’t sure how I’d set it all up, but I didn’t think a blog would be it.
I just so happened to stumble onto Boho Berry and The Dainty Squid within a matter of days of each other, and I knew almost immediately that this was what I was looking for. I always knew that I was more comfortable expressing my thoughts through writing them out versus saying them out loud, which is why I always found it funny that I run a vlog. I’m ADHD, and through writing I could always take my time to gather my thoughts into something cohesive, and I could always back space as much as I need to. While you could do something similar through editing a video, it just isn’t as smooth as the written word.
I still have every intention of continuing to vlog because I do enjoy it, but I’ll probably be blogging much more often than I vlog.
