Reporting from my new apartment, midnight breeze and stray motorbike engines and the thud-thud of beetles against the terrace light:
My latest piece on Vela, “A Trip To The Castle,” went up yesterday. It’s about—well, yeah, a trip to a castle I took with my friend Genti in Shkoder, Albania. It was his first trip back to the castle, where he used to hang out as a teenager, since he left his home during the 97 civil war. It’s also about living with weird memories and ghosts and shit, and about being caught in that funny inbetween place: between cultures, between countries, between youth and age—not quite one or the other, not quite anything. I’m pretty stoked on it.
But, on that note, an update on the state of my writing and this blog:
In the 6 weeks since quitting my job and venturing off into my new life, my attitude and approach towards my writing has changed. A surprising amount of mental space has opened up. Writing is my only jam now, and I find myself thinking about it constantly, always kind of in the back of my head: what would make a good article, where I could it pitch to, etc.
And, since writing is (for now) my only source of income, a lot of stuff I’d normally be putting up here is migrating over to other (read: paid) outlets. I’m going to become a much more frequent contributor over at Matador, where they’ve expressed interest in covering my transition into expat-hood.
So since mama’s got rent to pay and street food to buy, you’ll be following a lot more links instead of reading stuff directly on this blog. It’ll be fun. I hope.
And a big big thank you to everyone who contributed towards my project and towards making all this happen. A proper thank-you post is coming, along with cool swag like handmade postcards and zines and stuff (which will undergo their own adventures, in the Cambodian postal system).
Thank you all for the love, for the reading, and for following along this journey with me. Makes this Lonely Girl—sitting, alone of course, in her new apartment on the other side of the earth—feel a lot less lonely.
Lonely Girl Travels 
I was literally just writing you an email about most of the stuff in this post. I’m ridiculously excited for all the new writing.
This makes it official, right? You’ve declared that you have less time to write for free because you need that time to write for money. The scales have tipped from “Freelance Writer Who Waits Tables” to “Freelance Writer Who Pays Her Rent With Her Writing.” Props, Lauren.