Hello, World — And Yes, I'm Terrified

Welcome to my first blog post. I've rewritten this opening line about seventeen times. Then leapt straight back to the KISS principle!

There's something both thrilling and quietly terrifying about typing words onto a page that other people are actually going to read. Not just any page — my page. A website with my name on it. Jenny Porter , Author. Even writing that feels like I'm borrowing someone else's confidence and hoping nobody asks for it back.

So let me start with the truth: I am equal parts excited and dithering about in a panic!

The excitement is real. It hums in my chest on good days like electricity, this sense that something long-overdue is finally, finally taking shape. These stories — my stories — have lived inside me for a long time. Some of them for over a decade. Characters I've carried around like old friends, worlds I've slipped into during quiet moments, plots I've turned over in my mind on sleepless nights and long drives and in the shower when the best ideas always seem to arrive uninvited. They've been patient with me. Waiting.

And now I'm letting them out.

That part? That part feels wonderful.

But here's the other part, the part I think most writers understand even if they don't always say it out loud: putting your stories into the world means putting yourself into the world. And that is a vulnerable, exposed, slightly nauseating feeling.

What if people don't connect with them? What if the characters I love feel flat to someone else? What if the worlds I've built in such vivid detail in my head don't translate onto the page the way I imagine them? Writing in private is safe. Writing for an audience is something else entirely.

I've sat with those fears for a long time, actually. Perhaps too long. They were part of why the stories stayed half-finished, tucked away in folders and notebooks and drafts-that-never-quite-got-there. Fear is an excellent procrastinator. It dresses itself up in practical excuses — not yet, not ready, not good enough — and you can spend years nodding along to it before you realise what's actually happening.

Then something changed.

I won't share all the details here, not yet — some things are still raw, still being processed — but last year I faced something significant. An event that stopped me in my tracks. One of those moments that rearranges your priorities without asking permission, that strips away the noise and leaves you staring at “what now”.

And what I kept coming back to, in the quiet aftermath of that news, was this: the stories.

Not "I should finish them one day." Not "maybe when things settle down." Just — the stories. There, insistent and bright, refusing to be deferred any longer. If I've learned anything, it is that later is not the guarantee we treat it as. The things we love deserve more than the leftover scraps of time we give them once we've taken care of everything else.

So I decided to be brave. Or at least to act brave, which I've come to think might be the same thing.

I sat back down. I opened the folders. I met my characters again, like old friends after too long apart. And I wrote.

This website is the next step in that act of bravery. It's me saying: here I am, here are my stories, I hope you love them even a fraction as much as I do.

I'm nervous. I won't pretend otherwise. But I'm also more excited than I've been about writing in a very long time — that particular aliveness you feel when you're finally doing the thing you kept putting off.

Thank you for being here, right at the beginning. It means more than you know.

Today I’m grateful for  “ words”

More soon, Jenny x