Vancouver, June 9, 2004 – An undated handout photo of Jennifer Selk, part-time Sun Staffer and writer. [PNG Merlin Archive]

So it’s only two days till my birthday.

The big … well, nevermind. I know. I’m still a baby.

Actually, I don’t know. I’ve been sprouting grey hairs all year and they’re totally freaking me out, but people keep telling me I’m practically still in diapers, so it must be true, right?

Anyway, I’ve been resistant to blogging because I’ve always thought it was pretentious and self-absorbed, but it seems like everyone thinks I should give it a go, and I’m nothing if not obedient. And I’m less than nothing if I’m not pretentious and self-absorbed.

I can’t promise anything. I may or may not keep the site updated and I have no idea how often I’ll blog.

This site was meant to be a simple archive of my published work, but since starting at Dose, I’ve already published around 200 stories. And then there’s all the drivel I wrote before that. I’ve decided it would be crazy to try to archive it all. The new plan is to be selective.

By all means, tell me what you think. You can email your feedback via the link on the main page.

Talk at you soon … maybe,
Jen

2018: When this (my first-ever blog post) was originally published, I think I was indeed a bit of a baby.

Not yet 25, I’d been living in Vancouver, BC, Canada full-time for nearly three years, since the summer after college, and had been working on and off in a bunch of different positions at The Vancouver Sun newspaper since the summer of 1999. (I’d spent three summers there during college, then held a marketing job at an environmentally-focused architecture firm called Bunting Coady Architects (now part of B+H architects) for just over a year before returning to the Sun on a contract-basis.)

I’d been recruited to work at Dose (originally promised to me to be a “youth magazine”), internally, since The Sun and Dose were under the same umbrella publisher, but which turned out in practice to be more of a commuter-daily, and which ceased print publication after less than a year, moving to a digital-only format. That may have been the plan all along, but lowly staff such as myself weren’t privy to that information.

At this point, when I published my first ever website and blog post, I’d been with Dose for about six months, and had played a significant role in its gestation and formal launch (there were only a handful of writers, and we all did an incredible amount of work). I was suddenly writing upwards of five print-journalism pieces per day, though had no formal journalistic training (no J-School) or guidance.

I was already overworked and on the road to burnout, but I was also incredibly naïve, eager, faux-confident, and working my little ass off. If anyone out there is tracking my personal history, all of this may be worth noting.