Not a blogger after all

In news that will come as no surprise to the few patient people who read this page, I've realised I'm not a blogger after all. I've never quite figured out this blog - who I am writing for, what I'm about. I write lots elsewhere, so rather than let this fester, I'm closing it down for a bit until I figure out what it wants to be when it grows up.

Thanks to everyone who bore with me while writing so very, very little here. I'll still be reading you, and when I have stuff to write here, I'll write

horizon

Don't you love a wide, blank one? Like on the sea, with nothing in sight. Just a little sundrop of light near the shore, making the dark water sparkle

A view on writers' block

I used to think of writers' block as a major problem, a massive barrier that sealed off creativity from the page, thought from the hand that writes, originality from the pen. The main thing is, I used to think of it as huge, like the great wall of China, extending in all directions so that the only way to get past it was to smash it down in some hopelessly inadequate way.

Don't think that any more.

Now I see writers' block as more like the wall in the picture above - a fine big strong barrier if you are a small creature with no perspective. If you're right in under the wall, you do indeed feel trapped. And you could labour away there chipping at the bottom stones to little avail apart from perhaps causing some of the top ones to fall on you.

Or ...

You could simply walk away - walk back and see how small it is, or walk alongside it, living with it, not fighting it, and see where it ends. Get a little perspective, and soon you will be writing again.

That's my new plan, anyway. If you hit a block, that means it's time to break open a good book and a smoothie, sit in the sun, go for a walk, and wait til perspective shows you where the end of the wall is, and how you can start writing again. The important thing in the meantime being not to panic, not to be afraid. It's just a little wall. You're climbing a big mountain. There's an easy way past this, and you'll see it soon

Unreasonable hope

OK, what is it with this unreasonable hope thing? The thing that makes you buy lotto tickets, or send speculative emails to people who could do you great good, or approach gorgeous people of the opposite sex, or the same sex if that's your thing? What is it that makes you beleive?

I mean it's one thing to pack up your baby stories and so on into envelopes, all dressed up in their double-spacing and their names and addresses on separate pages, and send them off to a competition. That's fine. That's reasonable hope.

Where it gets unreasonable is when time passes and you wonder, you actually wonder why you haven't heard yet that you're shortlisted, or a winner, or nominated for the Nobel Prize or whatever.



And then you find that other people who have entered the competition have heard that they have won, so the only reasonable conclusion is that you haven't. Reasonable, if it were not for the massive doses of unreasonable hope that have by now convinced you it's only a matter of time until that happy letter pops in the letterbox. And I don't mean the Dunnes one with your value club points.

Sigh. Back to the real world - thanks to Emerging Writer for the sad news about my non-success.

Graduating!

Nothing to do with writing, but I've been awarded a Bocktorate

long time

I haven't posted here in ages. I'm not sure why. I've been writing, just not here. And I've been reading the blogs I read from here.

I suppose I haven't had a life public enough to blog about. But privately, it's been good. I don't quite know how to find the publishable bits in it ..

The Cult of Done

Lifted, verbatim from the best blog I found today, Pageslap

She is one smart and funny writer!! And she says ...

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.

2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.

3. There is no editing stage.

4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.

5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.

6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.

7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.

8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.

9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.

11. Destruction is a variant of done.

12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.

13. Done is the engine of more.