MOH MANYANG
Welcome - Bhɨkӑ Ntwoh
Bee's Blog
Bee's
BLOG
Source: Photo by Manuel Sardo on Unsplash
In the past decade, I developed an interest in cooking and baking. Because of this new-found pastime, I would often search online for recipes of meals which I enjoyed eating and try to make them myself. One trend I observed while searching online was that I couldn’t find recipes for many Cameroonian dishes which I wanted to try out. I often resorted to phoning family and friends to ask them if they could share their recipes with me. This was a bit of a tiresome exercise and it got me thinking about how much easier it would be if traditional Cameroonian recipes could be found online. Having already collected several recipes from family and friends, I decided to build a website where I could document them for an online audience. This was the primary motive for my blog.
Being a software engineer with an interest in web development, this was also the perfect opportunity for me to build my first fully functioning website. In a sense, I was killing two birds with one stone when I started the blog. As challenging as building a website seemed, posting new recipes regularly, proved to be a more difficult task. I slowly began to realise that I enjoyed the process of writing up the recipes more than I enjoyed looking for new recipes to post on the blog.
As a voracious reader of fiction, I decided to try my hand at writing book reviews. I then re-designed my blog to have two themed pages – one for recipes and another for reviews. Although the ‘book review’ section of my blog was quite scanty to begin with, it was very quickly filled up with my opinions of various novels which I had read. And in no time at all, it soon matched the volume of content on the ‘recipes’ section.
In the course of time, I faced a new problem with writing book reviews - I was reading far too many novels and I wasn’t getting enough time to write up as many reviews. I often found myself in a position where, by the time I got around to reviewing a specific book, I would have already read two or three other novels. Slowly, as time went on, I found myself writing fewer book reviews.
By this point I was thoroughly enjoying blogging, and although I could boast of no readership save for a handful of family and friends, I was keen to keep up with this creative outlet. Over the years, I had been writing poems in a little green book; these poems were never meant to see the light of day as I felt that they were too amateurish for anyone to be interested in them. Also, it is my opinion that poetry has become one of the more obsolete art forms; so, I didn’t see any real value in them save for expressing myself to myself. However, I decided to post one of my poems on my blog and I shared the link on two social media platforms. I was pleasantly surprised to see the positive response it received. This effectively encouraged me to delve deeper into some other forms of writing such as opinion pieces, creative non-fiction and short stories.
In the past year, I have completely stopped posting recipes and book reviews on my blog. I have been concentrating more on opinion pieces and the creative writing forms mentioned above. I cannot claim to be great at it by any means, and although my readership has only marginally increased in the past year, I am proud of the new direction which my blog has taken. I hope that with time I will be able to create even better-quality articles to post on the blog.
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