How daft I was, thinking anybody would be interested in what I have to say. Anyone other than spammers and hackers. Remove them from the equation, and we’re left with no one at all. Lesson learned.
I work on a project with a passion, it occupying every thought and second, for weeks on end. Then, all of a sudden, I stop. It’s gone. All interest in it has left me. I can no longer be bothered with it. Is that good or bad? Could be either. Perhaps I’m never meant to …
That didn’t take long, did it? Coming to the realisation that the membership thing was self-indulgent nonsense. Does anyone really care that much? Nope. Nobody but spammers and hackers, anyway. So I backtrack, disabling that functionality. Now we have two content states: published or unpublished, accessible or not. Does that mean I’ve withdrawn all of …
For about five years now, I’ve spent a lot of my time writing about… erm… writing. Writing about writing, with nothing to show for it. For a while, somewhere back towards the end of 2021, I thought I would pursue those dreams of being a published writer once more. But, as you will have seen, …
I spend months and years on a project I believe in. I invest all of my emotional energy in striving for perfection. This time, I’ll do it right. But as soon as it’s completed, the doubts set in. Soon enough, I can’t stand the sight of it. Every time I reopen it, I slam it …
Some people suffer from writer’s block. I suffer from writer’s anxiety. On the one hand, I find myself with a compulsion to write. On the other hand, I fear being read. “Why not just pour your words into a private journal then, to be read by no one at all?” A fair point, for many …
I am asked what happened to my writing — that novel I thought I was on the verge of publishing three years ago. Let’s just call it a great hiatus. Right now, it lies abandoned for the simple reason that I believe it made me ill. Hypertension. Accute anxiety. Depression. Extreme writer’s doubt. Call it …
Yes, I am repetitive. I know I am. I’ll often pen the exact same post, months or years apart, forgetting I’ve already done so. Think that’s bad? You should listen to my conversations. I suppose I have limited interests, so have limited things to say. I know my stuff in my own narrow fields of …
A reader gets in touch to say they’re planning to start a blog of their own, and asks for my advice on writing consistently. Unfortunately for the reader, I’m not a professional writer capable of offering sage advice on good habits to avoid procrastination. I write because I’m not a talker. In fact, for many …
The critic made me give up writing fiction for a decade. Their review was so scathing that I couldn’t hear the positive feedback of others. It was so publicly assertive that I swore to pulp every copy and cease writing for good. Suddenly, their critique held greater authority than even my own experience. Though others …
My mind is so noisy. Maybe it’s time I exchanged writing for meditation.
Writing, generally, is a one-way conversation. I’ve realised that most of my conversations are like that. It doesn’t feel like an exchange of ideas. Mostly, I just seem to be talking to myself. No feedback. Nothing. No reciprocal exchange. When I do finally surface the kind of ideas I write about here, they just seem …
Let’s face it: it’s my ego which causes me to write in public like this. However, in this age of cyber threats, it scarcely seems worth it anymore. If I disappeared from cyberspace, would anyone protest? Only my ego, surely. Perhaps it’s time to seriously countenance that, and flee the public domain at last.
I’m always disappointed to discover I’m not really anonymous. Yesterday, I was most perturbed when that old friend of mine said, “I read your blog.” Hearing him, I simply replied, “Oh dear.” My default reply to anyone who knows me. Perturbed because last time we met, I didn’t even have a blog. I did have …
Striving for perfection, which is impossible, I rarely finish my personal projects. And when I do finish something, I usually then obliterate it in a fit of melancholic resolve, consigning every trace of it to the dustbin of history. Perhaps it would be better if I just stopped starting things.
