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.

Now I've managed to succesfully put the journal-writing on hold, however, I've no longer got a place to put down my thoughts about the things I read, or see, or think. All my neuroses tend to go into working on a story. So it seemed to me to make sense to put all the other stuff up on a blog. That way I might actually find people who share my thoughts. Or more exciting yet, disagree with and want to challenge them. At the very worst, it'll all be ignored and, like Samuel Butler and William Gaddis, I'll have something to read when I'm older.

This is an attempt at an outlet, in any case. I hereby christen this attempt Small Boats.