About Nikki Mascali Roarty

Hello there, and welcome to Ink for Blood, a blog I started in 2010 — and am returning to in late 2020 after a nearly five-year hiatus.

I stopped blogging not just because of time and life, but because, as a journalist and news editor in one of the most contentious periods of our history, I was feeling burnt out, uncreative. While I still wrote/and write in my journal every day as a form of self-treatment therapy, I needed time away from words on the screen in my spare time because if I’ve learned anything in the past five years, it’s the importance of self-care, of self-preservation, of taking a step back for my sanity. Or what little of it is left these days.

Over the past few months as we’ve been in lockdown at home on Roosevelt Island in NYC amid the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve journaled a lot more — plowing through two journals in less than six months for the first time in my life of journaling, a practice I began in the way, way, way back year of 1994. I’m now scratching away with my trusty blue Papermate pen in Book No. 33 since then.

As a professional news editor, I don’t do much professional writing of my own these days, hence my return back to Ink for Blood. I need an outlet for my own creativity again, finally. I’m ready. Even if it’s just for myself. And, hopefully, you, dear reader!

Here are a few nuggets about me:

• I’m currently a digital news editor at The New York Post, a dream job at a paper I only dreamed about working at when I went back to school to study journalism at 27, making me the oldest intern my first paper back in Pennsylvania ever had, a badge I wore proudly — and still do.

• In the many, many years since that internship, I’ve worked as a financial, real estate, lifestyle and news reporter/editor and freelance editor and travel writer for companies like Metro, Facebook, Scary Mommy and TripAdvisor.

• I’m a former podcaster, starting the “High Regard Show” with my husband, Tom, in 2015, which can still be found on SoundCloud and iTunes. We talked to many big-name and creative types about the things they hold in high regard — and shared our experience with Tom’s diagnosis of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), a little-known autonomic nervous system disorder.

• I am a staunch follower of the journalist’s bible, the AP Stylebook, and even consult it for personal use.

• I’m a lifelong reader, who looks forward to sharing reviews of the books I’ll be reading on these pages.

• I’m the proud mother of a rescue pit bull, Prince, who is the best and most handsome boy in the world.

• My favorite word is Egyptologist.

• I love to write haiku and tanka poetry.

• Books and newsprint are my favorite smells.

• I also pen the blogs Run, Nikki, Run, where I write about my quest to exercise more and eat better, and Nikki & New York, my love letter to the galaxy’s greatest city, where we moved in September 2012.

• Not only is the name of my blog Ink for Blood — I also have a tattoo of a quill and ink on my back that proves it, with the words “may my quill never run dry.” The words came from one of my favorite interview subjects, a homeless bookbinder named Stitch, who wrote those words to me many years ago in a thank you note on paper he made.

I’ve made a career out of using a proverbial quill, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading my words from it.

NMMR