We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Crystal Chetosky. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Crystal below.

Crystal, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you tell us the backstory behind how you came up with the idea?

I have always been interested in writing. English was my favorite subject in school and my grandma was a reporter for the Oakland Press. But I’ve never gotten around to doing anything with it. Until recently.

Our family decided to move 2.5 hours north, from Royal Oak, MI to Lake, MI. Around the same time, I was looking into new ways to bring in some additional income for our family, and I came across the idea of blogging. I thought this would be the perfect time to try it out! Rather than spamming everyone on my personal social media, I would write about it in a blog and share our journey.

So I did some research on how to start a blog, how to run a website, where to promote my story and how to gain subscribers. This was a very large learning curve and I immediately became frustrated with the website portion. I had never done this before, and struggled to get my website to look how I wanted it to. I watched a ton of YouTube videos and did a lot of reading to get to where I wanted to be. Even now, I could use some improvements.

Once I felt like I was ready to post on my website, I had to make the announcement that I was going to share our journey on my blog with family and friends. I was a little nervous about this part. I didn’t want to be judged or hear any negative backlash. I just wanted to write, and share our story because I thought it would be interesting, funny, relatable, and exciting.

I’ve been posting for several months now, and I’ve really enjoyed it so far. I’m looking forward to learning more about the business/profit aspects of having a blog and, hopefully, brining in a little more money for the family as I continue to grow. I know this can be successful because it’s something that I’m passionate about and I am a very motivated person.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’ve always been a creative person. I’ve enjoyed the arts since I was a child and even got a degree in Photography and had my own photography business for a period of time. Unfortunately, my photography business didn’t make me enough money to sustain myself. (Too many friends/family discounts given!) So I went back to school and got a second degree in Business Management.

From there I found myself working in the Automotive industry. I enjoyed the work I was doing and managed to work my way up in several different sales roles. I’m actually still working for an automotive supplier as a Sales Account Manager, as my full time job. But it wasn’t filling my creative desire. So, when the opportunity to start a blog came up, I decided to jump on it.

In the beginning, I just wanted to share our experiences. Moving from the city to the country was going to be an entertaining story to tell and I wanted to share it with our friends and family. Naturally, this progressed to us exploring the new area, visiting other businesses and attending events. I’ve been happy to post about the fun places we’ve visited and that put me on the path of promoting.

I’m proud of how far I’ve come with our family blog in a short period of time. With two young children and a full time job, it hasn’t been easy to find time to write, take photos/videos and find time to post. Not to mention making sure that I have stories to blog about. But it has been a lot of fun navigating this new creative adventure. I’ve learned a lot along the way and I’m looking forward to seeing how far I can take this.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I’m not sure if all creatives struggle with this, but something that I have found difficult is what I like to call “Artistic ADHD”. I often feel like I have so many creative things and projects that I want to work on that I can get distracted and pulled in a lot of different directions.

For example, I have been trying to focus on my blog, but I’ve also been working on recording and editing videos/vlogs of our adventures, I’ve wanted to get back into photography and I have also been contemplating writing a book. Sometimes, when I’ve been working on a particular project for an extended period of time, I get bored with it and want to pause it and work on something else. Unfortunately, that often leads to uncompleted projects and lots of unfinished ideas.

I feel like most creative people can relate to this because we are often interested in multiple formats of art.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I think my overall goal of our family blog is just to share our story. I believe we have a lot to say as a family, and I know we will have plenty of funny stories, frustrating days and heartbreaks in our future. Ideally, we would like to help some people along the way. Hopefully, a reader can get a laugh from one of our posts, be able to relate to a frustration or not feel alone in a struggle they may be dealing with.

I would also like to get an opportunity to promote more businesses and share fun places for other families to visit. Although we are publicly posting about our lives, we are also trying to live life in the moment and make sure that we are making a lot of memories as a family. If we have a good time at a particular place, I would love to be able to share that experience with other families and help them make memories as well.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.cheetofamily.com
• Instagram: cheeto.family
• Youtube: @cheeto.family

Image Credits

Crystal Chetosky