Blog as Graveyard?

 

Orwell's grave
not too far from where I live

This past few days I've been ill. Apart from making me a bit miserable, being off work and stuck in bed also got me thinking about all the things I haven't done this year. Like keeping a blog.

Cheerfully, I said to myself: "that site's like a graveyard now". Having spoken, I then proceeded to cough for half an hour.

As you can see, I took a very long break from blogging. I put too much pressure on myself to make posts as good as possible. I've had many drafts lined up for a long time, always almost ready for people to see.

The same could be said for my writing in general. It must be time for a change in approach or attitude or something.

Comparing a blog to a graveyard's not a very apt metaphor though. After all, it's on the active blogs that posts get buried. An abandoned blog is more like an unsown field.

Or perhaps in my case more like a rundown dockyard, from which small boats no longer cast off. Time to make some little rafts to get things going again. I have to remember that even the ricketiest things will float, even if they won't actually sail.
 

Excuses, excuses. . . .

For recent lack of posting to this blog:

• A spate of busy-ness
• A bout of illness
• A series of recent musical interludes and upheavals
  

Small Boats

This summer gone, I was in Mongolia — the trip itself is another story entirely. But while I was out there, I promised myself that when I returned to England I would do some things to make my life a bit more fulfilling. One thing was to go swimming on a regular basis. Another was to stop drinking, at least until Christmas. And yet another was to stop writing a journal and get on with some real writing. That is, stuff that I'd be comfortable to have other people read.

I've been keeping journals since I was seventeen. They are very personal, private things and most of them are boxed up in storage. However, over the last couple of years I've found that whenever I sat down to work on something, I'd often write about it in my journal before or after. It got to the point recently where I was writing the journal instead of doing the actual work. Spending time in a country that hasn't ever really had an industrial period makes a lot of things back here seem absurd.