More About Me & This Site

Because who the heck do I think I am, anyway?

I got my start writing online as contributing editor for a wedding planning site, back in 2007. I only held the job for about six months, because they sold the website to another, larger company with conservative ties (and I didn’t want anything to do with that). Before I left though, I had established a reader base who’d followed along with my wedding planning blog posts through to the wedding itself.

When I did leave, many of those readers stayed in touch as I created Rainy Day Templates, my very modest blog design business (some even became customers). When that fizzled out, I bopped around in the usual aughts places, where interested folks/fans kept tabs on me. In 2012, I started my personal blog, Elliequent. My readership grew through word of mouth (I was regularly dissected in blog snarking circles, usually with appreciation but occasionally with well-deserved criticism) and Instagram, where I was very active, and very social for about five years. I went hard on blogging and social media, writing almost daily for the next ten years. The content was a mix of personal journaling about my real life, and creative pieces that explored, interpreted, celebrated, or otherwise processed those real life experiences.

There is no question that blogging saved my life. It was the best therapy I ever could have invested in, because more than helping me cope with the things I was going through (divorce, the deaths of my entire family of origin, shitty jobs, and some seriously shady relationships), it empowered me creatively in a way nothing else could have. And there is no job I ever could have had, that would have allowed me to understand myself—and to fall wildly in love with my own life—the way blogging and creative writing have. It has made all the difference in who I am today, and why I am still here.

Equally precious to me is the feedback I have gotten from readers over the years. It has been the privilege of a lifetime to write for the kind of people who so graciously call themselves my fans. The dozens and dozens of emails I’ve received in the nearly two decades I’ve been doing this—well, they are everything to me. Just absolutely everything. I’ve quoted some of them over in Listlandia, if you’re interested.

But at some point towards the end of the pandemic, I’d had enough of Los Angeles (where I’d moved to from Tucson, soon after my wedding). I’d had enough of all the awful changes to Instagram. I’d had enough of social media, period. I’d had enough of people in general, and all the ways I’d been hurt by them. I’d lost any desire to connect with other humans—and that connection is where so much of the magic in my writing comes from.

I moved to Chicago, changed jobs twice, and generally settled down to a life of near hermitage. I tore down Elliequent and built What Ellie Does, a place to house everything I remained proud of—everything that felt evergreen. 99% of my personal writing was tossed. I wanted my presence online to be only that of a creative person. I spent ages building the site out, stopping and starting as motivation waxed and waned. (This was about the time the world started going to serious shit, and I was too depressed by what I was seeing to do much creatively.)

Here and there I wrote, but my life by this point was so quiet and I was so antisocial that I didn’t have much new material. And the lift was just too great, what with the awfulness of 2024 onward, to reach deeper for the purely inventive stuff.

That is more or less where I am today: in the cultural, political, and economic morass that is 2026. I am sickened and heartbroken by the state of the world, which is unrecognizable from the one I grew up in. I reached a point of such despair and disgust that out of desperation I have taken up the personal pen again. I’m writing just to stay sane—to give my mind a break and a better challenge than the constant coping required to live in this mad, sad world we’ve made.

Anyway, that’s a bit more on me.

If you’re new here, I’d like to give you a bit of a breakdown about this site.

I run two blogs: Creative & Personal (both self-explanatory). If you know me in real life, there is a very good chance the Personal blog will make you uncomfortable. Sorry about that. (Or not, depending on who you are.) Either way, proceed with caution. Not much of a filter over there. Posts on Creative sit for a while until eventually they get copied over to their forever home, somewhere in Collections.

Collections is my portfolio. Every piece there is special to me. Every piece dials up some moment in my life that I want to hold onto. I’ve ordered it by my favorites, left to right, top to bottom. I’d say this ordering also generally reflects my best to worst writing. If you are new here, I would most want you to start in Fairy Tales & Apologues. That is where my heart beats strongest. I’m also very proud of my Nounimals, which are super challenging but fun to write.

Allsorts is where I house various other random stuff it’s fun to share. The Vault is a place I share old favorite pieces, if for no other reason that I have so very much here, you couldn’t possibly get through it all without guidance.

As to my writing, depending on where you are, you might see it vary wildly in tone, formality, and, frankly, talent. I’ve made the decision to include much of the very casual, sloppy, thrown-down-on-the-fly stuff, because it’s all part of the picture of me and my life, these last fourteen years.

The only social media I have anymore is Reddit, and only for lurking. But you can always email me anytime: whatelliedoes@gmail.com.