Dear Readers,

Thank you so much for reading A Little Beacon Blog, and for finding value in the stories we share, and the obsessive organization we take pleasure in with the Things To Do In Beacon Guides. Thank you to each and every advertiser who has invested in A Little Beacon Blog, using it as an outlet to reach readers just like you, encouraging them to frequent these hard-working businesses, both the growing ones and those long established in this area. Without you, the way in which we produce this blog - with the varying degree of frequency, image production, and social media sharing to reach long-distance readers, following Beacon from California, Vermont, New York, all over, who are all vying to move here (for real...it's not just folks from Brooklyn!), as well as lifers who grew up here and are loving the changes - it would not be possible. You see, this blog is my business. When you visit this blog, you are standing in front of my storefront, and deciding to come in and explore.

Always obsessed with magazines, I wanted to write for them. Jane Pratt of Jane Magazine was my idol. I sold newspaper ads for the college newspaper and wrote a love advice column called "Dear Trudy." I went on to be the editor-in-chief of the school's literary magazine after it had started to fall apart (as I had a knack for graphic design), laying the whole thing out, and working with a team of very different people to produce a unified publication.

The business person in me (before I knew I had a business person in me), and the creative person in me, wanted to create a magazine. That is a bold statement, to be sure, as I had no idea what it meant to produce a magazine. Keeping that in the back of my mind, I tried other careers. I worked for a season on Law & Order as a production assistant. I learned the fascinating ways that people measure other people's likes and dislikes while working in the Research Department of the Food Network. I learned the ways of contracts and sifting through book ideas as an editorial assistant at Harper Collins. I took writing courses at MediaBistro. And then I fell into website production while taking costume design courses at FIT. This is also where I discovered blogging, which circles it all back to creating a magazine.

While blogging on the side, and after working for three years as the website editor for a national nonprofit organization, I quit my day job and hung my shingle as a website designer and producer. It was there that I started working heavily with small businesses to produce their dream websites, to sell their products and services. I was honored to work with a nonprofit who built schools in Africa, a yoga teacher who produced DVDs for pregnant women, and so many other shops on the web that you would love. My career morphed into another business that is a training platform for small businesses to learn to get the word out about their businesses using websites, PR, social media, and more. This began my opportunity to work with corporate advertisers like Capital One Spark, who contracted us to blog about the film crew they hired to make videos about business owners, getting to the heart of why they started and what made them tick.

When I moved to Beacon from a nondescript area of Manhattan, BOOM, the blogging fire was lit! Suddenly, so many story ideas began unfolding in my head, and fit perfectly like a puzzle. The local scene is so different from the national one, and so special. I have loved learning about how it works, and being a part of it. The businesses, large and small, are run by people who live here and are just like us, who have put their necks out on the line to live life on their terms to build a business that people hopefully frequent and love. And so this blog, this online magazine of sorts, was born in 2011, with this first post, from my iPhone.

Last year, I decided to make blogging about Beacon (one of) my full-time jobs. Nobody hired me; it's a job I made up. So far, you have liked the articles and return to read more. Those articles and Guides have been supported from businesses in this area with advertising, and I am so grateful. It means I can keep doing my job and keep on creating words and pictures you will hopefully like. :)