A little history...

I was browsing through some old photos last week and came this little animated graphic that I got made. I suspect it was around the mid to late 1990's, back when I was writing for The Mining Company (TMC) which was the original iteration of the site About.com. It brought back so many memories.

Originally founded in 1996 as The Mining Company, the site was launched on April 21, 1997 by Scott Kurnit, owner of General Internet, Bill Day, and a group of other entrepreneurs in New York City. The original goal was to maintain 1,800 topic areas, but after five years of operation, this number was reduced to around 700. [wikipedia] 

I am still friends with some of folks who wrote for The Mining Company, many of them women who banded together for support. This was my first "paid" freelance writing gig and my topic was "Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue & Related Disorders". Later I also did "RV Travel", but under my husband's name since we weren't allowed to have two topics.

Later I also wrote for Suite101.com and BellaOnline.com. Life changed and I left all the sites, at least for a while. I eventually went back to TMC in it's new version, About.com and took over the Senior Life site (even though I still had a few years to go before I would be considered a senior).

I also took over as web designer for RV Companion magazine and wrote a monthly column for them, 'Healthy Trails'. I also had a weekly column in a local free newsletter for seniors, 'Floppy Trails' (the floppy referring to floppy disks, yes, eons ago in the computer age).

This was when I was dabbling in fiction. This was when I gave it all up. This was 2001. My now late husband was diagnosed with cancer and all writing went on the back burner until 2006 when I started my first blog.

So there you have it, a little history!