Hello, I’m Nicole.

I don't have a personal social media anymore. I stopped using it a while back and I haven't missed it. But I kept running into a problem, which is that we travel a lot, and things happen out there that I want to keep, and I want the people I love to be able to find them. So this is that. A scrapbook, more or less. A place to put the things I don't want to lose.

I run a digital marketing company. Before that I was a copywriter. I have spent my entire working life learning how content works, what makes people click, what the algorithm wants, how to shape a sentence so it performs. I'm good at it and honestly I'm tired of it. It's my job, and I love parts of my job, but the formula is everywhere now. When I was first starting this and went looking for travel writing to inspire me, everything I found was the same. The same places, the same angles, the same interchangeable voice, everything built to rank instead of built to mean something. I get why it exists. I make some version of it for a living. I just couldn't find anything that felt like a person, and it left me kind of hollow, and eventually I realized that if I wanted the thing I was looking for I would have to write it myself.

So there are no rules here, except the ones I'm keeping for myself.

I write about what I want, when I want. Sometimes that will be a trip. Sometimes it will be one hour of one morning that stuck with me for reasons I need to write my way into before I understand them. That's the part I actually love. Writing has been my passion since long before it was my profession. It's how I process things. I love to reflect, I love to think slowly about something long after it happened, I love to feel things all the way through instead of skimming them. Storytelling is an art and I miss treating it like one.

And I don't write while I'm there. That one matters to me. When I travel I am present, fully, no part of me composing anything or thinking about how a moment will look later. I already know what happens to people who live behind the camera, who slowly turn into someone whose experiences exist to be posted. I watch it happen all day in my industry. The moment comes first. If it's real, it leaves a mark, and the mark is what I write from, usually weeks later, when the memories and feelings keep replaying long after the moment is gone. That's why it's called The Imprint Journal.

I'm not chasing followers and I'm not checking numbers. Nothing here is curated, optimized, or written for a keyword. If you found your way here looking for that kind of thing, it isn't here, and that's on purpose.

This is for my friends, for the people we meet out there, and for anyone who still wants writing that feels like it came from somebody. Mostly, though, it's for me.

xoxo Nicole