you paid for this: dishing on hellogiggles II

In my latest (and first) post about writing for HelloGiggles from 2012-2018, I teased that I'd write about my process. I'm going to try to not make fun of myself and treat myself like an Actual Writer With a Process because I've heard enough Actual Writers joke about their processes and it's like, "Doritos in bed with laptop," so even though no one has ever thrown a book deal at me because I went viral online, I do think my process might interest some of you.

The tldr from my last post is that HelloGiggles offered me my own weekly column, which I called Everything I Need to Know, I Learned From (EINTKILF), loosely based on a book I loved growing up called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. That book is full of life lessons from some fucking guy, but I loved the format, I loved reflecting, I loved learning from someone else's experiences.

And that's what I did with my first EINTKILF, which was about The Simpsons. I explored what I learned from a show that meant, and still means, a lot to who I am as a person and has shaped what I find funny.

When HelloGiggles offered me a weekly EINTKILF column, the website was a little baby website. They offered me, and a few other people, columns that weren't really fact-checked or edited by anyone else. When I first started writing EINTKILF, I'd type it up in a Google Doc, log in to the shared HelloGiggles WordPress account, and paste it into the site.

EINTKILF, for most of its life, was published on Monday mornings.