HI, EVERYONE! I'm Brava and this is my first post

I’m letting you know right now Brava is not my real name because I’d like to remain juuuust a bit anonymous in the blogging blockchain of things for a bit longer.   

Truth is, I’m not a social media type of person and you won’t find a public account of me displaying a photo of what I had for breakfast – unless, of course, I failed to activate the right privacy settings… Which, sigh, is very possible. 

So this is a BIG step for me, fake name and all   

Sure, some of you will recognise me immediately from the photo despite the oddball outfit (it was a cold day, thus the hat; my pantaloons kept snagging everywhere, thus the tucking into my husband’s socks. I’d been busy scraping off the glue left over from peeling off the vinyl floor from the beautiful cement floor tiles). Others will figure out who I am with some techie tool I don’t know about, and still others will be fine and dandy with not knowing everything about the real me because my Steemit persona will be enough. It is for me, if you post under an assumed name.   

It’s taken me a while to take the leap. But there, I’ve done it . Still a lot to learn, but for now I’ll concentrate on getting this post written and will do my best to upload images the right way. Wish me luck.

My Steemit name 

I chose the name Brava because it reminds me of bravo! and brave, and it’s also a Portuguese adjective in the feminine gender meaning wild and undomesticated. That’s me :) !    

A big advantage of remaining partly anonymous in this platform is that I can let myself go a bit more and express myself more freely. Not always the kind of thing I want to do when I’m standing in front of a class of first year university students who expect me to be terribly serious and magisterial.

How I knew Steemit would be a good thing    

When I took the time to look closer at Steemit, I knew it was right for me. I recognised it as a great platform to read and post articles on things that I am passionate about. 

I started imagining the many and varied posts that I could compose that I knew people would want to read because I too have searched the Internet for expertise on similar topics. 

I hope I can write posts that other Steemians will enjoy and that will attract Google searches into Steemit. Most of all, I predict that it’ll feel good being part to this community which is still so new and exciting.   

A bit more about me

I’m a writer (published, yes, and in the old way – on paper – but you’ll have to take my word for it because, to my publisher’s likely chagrin, I can’t tell you more or it would give too much away), a Creative Writing teacher with many years’ experience, a wife and mum, an Airbnb entrepreneur, and a recent blockchain convert.    

Where I'm from, where I'm at

I was born in Lisbon, Portugal, and now live in Brisbane, Australia, with my family – handsome husband, two beautiful teenage daughters and two ginger cats. 

[Original Lisbon photographs by Armandio Serodio (1962) and Unknown Photographer (1910)]

In between Portugal and Australia, I lived in several countries and continents: UK, Germany, USA, Venezuela…    

[My cat Harvey pretending he's near death from starvation so I'll give him a snack.]

I’ve also travelled quite a bit and speak 5 European languages that I learnt at high school and university, or by living in countries where they were spoken. I’ve led a full life with lots of interesting experiences and I look forward to sharing some of those in the context of whatever posts I might write for Steemit.   

Why blogging is new for me

In the past, I have often thought of writing a blog about how to go about writing stories (which is what I teach and have prepared hundreds of lessons on the stuff). But I knew I’d have little chance of people finding it. What with all the SEO stuff that I have little patience and time to learn and apply.    

Enter, Steemit.    

What I might write posts on

Aside from creative writing topics, I think I can write useful posts on several topics. One of them would be on my Airbnb journey because I know it has become a side business for many people around the world. 

I can also write about my cryptocurrency education journey because I know I’m not your typical blockchain convert, but there are many women my age out there who are just as skeptical as I was and will be searching the internet for personalised insights written by people closer to their demographic.

And of course I can write posts on my prevalent and/or current obsessions that almost always have something to do with literature, art, photography, women in history and women’s health.    

The blockchain, and what a newbie I am

But just to get to write this post, what a journey it’s been! Just some six weeks ago I hardly knew what cryptocurrency was (surely ‘cryptocurrency’ is the right spelling, right? Just goes to show how new it all is – we’re pioneers, and I find that preeeetty exciting, I confess – that my computer does not recognise it as a word).    

How it all began

It all started when my husband came home one day and told me about Bitcoin. 

I said, Mmmm… And then, Yeah… No.    

For a few days in a row, while I was on my laptop after dinner composing my latest masterpiece (more likely on Pinterest, where I’m an avid collector of historic photos of Lisbon, which you’ll probably hear more about), I could hear my husband on the desktop on YouTube watching men going on about Bitcoin, about the blockchain, crypto…    

He asked me if I approved of investing X in Bitcoin, and I said yes, but no more than X. And he went off and bought some Bitcoin and injected it all in a strange little gadget called a Trezor, which he tried to explain to me.

 And I said, Yeah… Sigh. Sure.  

This was in the heady times of late 2017/early January 2018 when the cryptocurrency market was high and heading higher. He’d arrive home from work and tell me about double figure percentage gains. And I said, Mmmm… Bubble. 

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble. 

(And I was right, as it turns out; not that I don’t think the bubble won’t inflate again).    

But my husband persisted. He’d shove his phone under my nose for me to admire tricoloured graphs with their skyrocketing upturns. He had tried to convert me to his passions before – drones, extreme camping (think sleeping out in the bush in the rain with just a swag), military history, road cycling, target shooting, and so on. But some things just don’t do it for me.  

What made me start investigating Bitcoin and cryptocurrency

I don’t know what finally made me think, What if? and leave the Pinterest tab and type ‘youtube bitcoin’ in Google. Who did I first come across on YouTube? (I do like a good YouTube tutorial). I believe it was Louis Thomas! And I now know he’s here too – Hi, @louisthomas, I love your videos!    

Naturally Louis’s video led me to others and then others still. Eventually it led me to @jerrybanfield via @suppaman (which profile I can't seem to now find), and that’s when I decided to look into Steemit.   

I confess 

When I first came across the Steemit platform I thought, Yeah… Meh 

A bit like when I first visited the office my husband and his male business partner had decorated together. Let’s just say I felt it could do with a bit more art, a better colour scheme, less generic furniture… 

But hey, my husband’s business (renewable energy storage, if you’re wondering) was a relatively new venture, and so is Steemit.   

Buying my first STEEM

When I came across the STEEM coin for the first time, I had already bought my first Bitcoin fraction as well as a selection of alt coins at the Australian exchange CoinSpot. 

Flash-forward to today and I’ve signed onto so many crypto exchanges that my Google Authenticator app is a few scrolls deep.    

But for a long while I shopped only at the overpriced but easy to use Australian crypto exchange CoinSpot and their attractive (if slightly random) collection of alt coins with their pretty logos. 

I remember clicking on STEEM, reading the blurb and thinking, Wha?? I did buy other coins for their pretty logos, and back then it didn’t seem to matter because they were all going up anyway.  But I wasn't tempted by STEEM at first.

Overtime, and few downturns in the market later, I became ridiculously well educated on crypto – if I compare myself to before, that is, not to you techie lot – and that’s when I bought me some STEEM. 

Some of which, by the way, is locked in the Poloniex exchange. (Note to self: Search Steemit posts on what’s up with Poloniex-STEEM.)    

And so here I am!    

I’ll leave it here for now, but I’ll probably be revealing more in my future posts than you ever wanted to know, never worry. By the way, below is an after photo of the bathroom I was renovating in the title photo.

Happy posting and bye for now,   

Brava