Hello fantastic folks and wonderful listeners, learners, dreamers, and readers! Welcome to Charlotte Dune’s Lagoon. I’m Charlotte Dune and I’m a writer. More specifically, I write fiction books, like The Psychedelic Love Series, and creative non-fiction, as well as short stories and the occasional poem. In the past, I’ve done many things, from working as a U.S. Diplomat, to producing documentary films, to running a successful Airbnb.
So, why start a new lagoon (aka blog/podcast) at age 40?
Well, closer to the early morning of the internet, in the year 2002, I crafted a personal blog on LiveJournal which grew quite popular and went on for seven years. I wrote a few times a month, usually from an internet cafe, because I didn’t have Wi-Fi at my apartment back then. The blog chronicled my travels, work, life, romance, and subsequent marriage while I lived in Uganda and Cameroon during my twenties. Readers commented on the blog from all over the world. This was pre-Facebook!
Then in 2007 I had a baby and got busy, and like many pre-parent pastimes, my blog became a thing of… past times… Now, 20 years since my first blog post, I’ve finally regained the bandwidth for regular online writing, and I realized, I really missed this.
As we grow, we depart from diversions, mistakes, and missteps, and return to the passions of our younger years.
For me, one of these younger passions was blogging. Acknowledging this loss gives me a hollow feeling in my chest, and I want to fill that space with new words and self-expression.
Is there a passion you enjoyed as a child but lost touch with? Or is there a hobby or interest you recently reclaimed as an adult? Let me know in the comments.
This was the last picture I had on my old blog — of corn growing outside my house in Cameroon. I felt so lost and overwhelmed back then like my life was growing thick with weeds. Luckily, I’m more clear-headed now. And look how tiny the photo is! Ahh, the resolution of the 2000s!
I missed the interactions on my old blog with family and folks from afar and the new people in my community that I met along the way. I loved the comments and the lively discussions.
You can’t socialize or interact with other readers on an email newsletter, and an algorithm controls Facebook and Instagram, so readers miss posts. The simplicity of Substack and the way you can subscribe to other Substackers, while also engaging with readers and having an email connection is appealing to me. This space feels like an advanced, streamlined LiveJournal designed especially for authors and writers, with an audio component that also excites me because I’m a fan of listening to podcasts and audiobooks in general, and I put a lot of effort into my own audiobooks, which are hosted exclusively by Audible at present, though I hope to offer samples here soon.
I also like the idea of a lagoon because it represents a location, a place, like my own private island. In the future, I’d like to bring readers on real retreats for writing and entheogenic practices, both in person and within the metaverse, where I could create a virtual lagoon for reading, telling stories, hanging out, dreaming, and hosting discussions.
In this space, I’ll also be experimenting with releasing new work, exchanging ideas, engaging other writers and thinkers, and inviting you to share your views with me. Some content will be open to every one, and some will require you to enter your email address. For now, I’ll keep this Lagoon free, but in the future, if things go well, I may add paid content.
I’m also opening the space to other creatives who would like to share written work, images, videos, and presentations or to be interviewed. If you’d like to contribute to the space, please reach out.
So, now I begin again. Here is the first post and the first picture of this experiment- taken at this exact moment. The mood is open, inviting, and expansive; the trees in the image grow at my current home in Florida.
And by the way, I made the cover image for this post with AI.
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Welcome to the Lagoon