Hello, world. Here I am. I am back. Did you miss me? No. Thought not.
In a bout of nostalgia, I was shuffling about online this week and realised how much I miss blogging. When I started flicking through the various blogs I’ve maintained over the years, I realised that it hasn’t just been months, but in some cases years since I’ve posted on some of my pages. Take this one, for instance. This one was intended to be the one where I consolidated all of my online presences and inane ramblings, but it never quite took off the way I hoped. My last post was almost 5 years ago — FIVE YEARS! Where has the time gone? My comedy blog fared better for a while, but even that died a death half way through the year when I packed in Facebook. I guess I just got too busy and let life get in the way. Never mind. I’m not going to put pressure on myself or worry about these things. I’ll gravitate back to them as and when I feel like it.
Anyway. Here I am. Here we all are. 2015 has gone, and 2016 has begun.
So. Why start blogging again now? Well, for starters, I’m half way through my masters degree, Glasgow University’s MLitt Creative Writing. After 5 years of swithering, dithering and false starts, I’m finally studying the course full time by distance learning and fitting it around my other work. I’d love to say it was going fantastically well, but as with many things in my life, life has gotten in the way and I’ve fallen behind. Sigh! I’m just about catching up, don’t get me wrong, but with deadlines looming 10 days away I’m already in a state of frantic catch up. And naturally, of course, I’ve taken a break on New Year’s Day to procrastinate further by starting my blog back up… Double sigh! At least it’s a form of writing, and at least it will be good for me… right?
What am I going to blog about here? Well, I’m not sure, really. I looked back at what I’d blogged about before, and it’s pretty embarrassing stuff reading it 5 years on. I thought about archiving my posts, or outright deleting them, but in the end I’ve decided to let it be. Who am I to deny the someone I used to be? Who says this current version of me is any better or worse than that old me? And who says future me won’t relate to old me better and cringe at the current me instead? Hmm.
I don’t know if I have a lot to say online. I’ve pretty much rejected much of my social media life in the past year or two. I rarely tweet on Twitter these days, despite way back in the beginning having had a UK Top 500 most influential account at one point (oh how the mighty fall, eh?). That type of thing is just not important to me now. It’s the quality of the connection that I long for now. I’d rather have wholesome relationships than follow the innane ramblings of tenuous contacts. Not that I want to sound ungrateful — I’ve met a lot of great people online and value a lot of what they share; but a lot of other stuff was just distraction I didn’t need. I shut down my Facebook account 8 months ago, and offline, it is over 3 years since I last had a television. All this mental freedom I’ve discovered now that I don’t have a persistent wall of noise and background chatter in my life is totally liberating. For instance, I’ve just smashed my Goodreads challenge for the second year in a row. In 2014 I set my sights on 100 books and read 120 — 2015 I aimed for 150 and in the nick of time hit 200 just the other day. Here’s my Year in Books if you’re interested. Having books and words and imaginary worlds in my life has been infinitely more pleasing than wasting my time the way I was before. If you’ve been feeling like you haven’t got time to do a lot of the things you’d enjoy, why continue denying yourself? Do something about it. Switch the telly off one or two nights a week for starters, and try to avoid reading other people’s timelines and updates for a few hours. You’ll find a whole lot more time suddenly opens up in your life than you knew you ever had.
Anyway. Back to this blog. I think I’m going to perform some healthy mind dumping from time to time. I’m enjoying my book challenges, and will probably keep track of what I’m reading here. This year, I’m mixing my challenge up a bit by introducing an actual themed reading challenge (click the graphic for details), one that my friend Catherine and a few others from offline are taking up with me. I’ll post about my progress with it here too. I’m planning to read at least one play every fortnight this year too, am aiming to finish a number of books off the To Read list I’ve been keeping for some time, and I’d also like to prove to myself that my writing is actually on track, so will be holding myself accountable to a public readership (even if there are only 2 or 3 of you!) by checking in with progress on my portfolio work here, along with my wee side discoveries and my bigger projects. It’s important to keep reminding myself that all this reading I’ve been doing is ultimately to lead me back full circle to my own writing, and that it’s just as important to me as all the other challenges I’ve lined up for myself. I’ll be doing daily pages again in 2016 on 750words.com (kinda like morning pages, except I break the rules a bit from the recommended Artist’s Way method and do them digitally and at any time of the day rather than freehand in the morning).
Right. That’s enough for now I think. No point running out of things to say on day one. Who am I writing for? Who is ever going to read this? Well, I don’t quite know the answer to either, other than to say I’m probably writing for no one other than myself and some future version of me to look back on. If you’ve happened to stumble upon my posts, I hope you find some modicum of wit or wisdom herein. If not — tough!