Friday, December 30, 2005

I keep thinking of blog posts I want to write, but never seem to feel much like writing them. I keep starting them in my head, but they never make it as far as the keyboard, let alone your screen. It's a sort of blogapathy.
Blogging goes in waves. I know this. Every blog has a lifecycle, an ebb and a flow, a to and a fro. The trouble is, not blogging and not reading blogs is making me feel a bit cut off from the world. There's a logic in saying that not having time to read blogs is making it harder to write – we all know that if a writer isn't writing it's because she's a lazy fuckwit not reading. But there's more to this than that.
Some say it's because I'm in love. Actually, the way I feel right now, that ought to be capitalised. I am in Love. But I think blaming T'Other for my blogapathy is unfair and just not right. If anything, he's given me more to blog about – I've seen more films, been to more new places (Paris, Bruges, soon Prague and then Washington (properly this time)), done more fun things* than when I wasn't with T'Other. We talk a lot too, about interesting things, but in general, not about the things I usually blog about.
I certainly don't have writer's block. Like Neil Gaiman, I don't believe in writer's block. The speed with which this post is being typed pretty much conclusively proves that there is no problem regarding the assemblage of words into coherent sentences.
I'm not sure that it's got anything to do with you guys either. I've had a biggish audience for ages, and frankly, although the stats tell me so and people whom I randomly meet at dinner tell me so, I don't believe that there is any more than three men and a dog reading this. So I'm not about to start freaking out because, Oh my gawd! People read me!
Kevin Marks suggests I am suffering from “working for a blog co. syndrome”, where when you suddenly start working for a blogging company you suddenly stop feeling like blogging, because blogging is work and therefore not something you do for fun. It's not that either. I've been working as a blog consultant for the last two years, and frankly, I've had more intensive periods of work-blogging than now and still leisure-blogged. Plus, 2.5 of my days a week is spent working on wikis (not blogs) and the other 5 days is spent working on digital rights (also not blogs) so the actual amount of actual blog-related work I am actually doing is, well, not so much.
I don't think it's stress. Yes, the last six months has been pretty stressful, but, you know, watching my business go nearly bankrupt was a lot more stressful, and I blogged the whole way through that.
Time is an issue, I'll give you that. But even so… usually I can find a second or two to throw something together.
This is more about not really wanting to blog. Not really feeling quite in the mood for it. And yet, it's also more than that. It's not something as fickle as mood.
I think that the reason I'm not writing is because I'm not writing, and I don't mean that in a 'lazy fuckwit' way. Because I've had weeks when I've just been too busy, all the posts I would have written have piled up inside my head, and now they're all jammed up together, higgledypiggledy, and nothing can get out. See, usually, I just open the doors of my head and the words all tumble out and all I have to do is arrange them nicely on the screen so that they make pretty patterns, but because I have this great big dam of unwritten posts, all the words are just getting snagged on one another and they aren't coming out at all. It's not writer's block. It's more like writer's logjam. (Or should that be blogjam?) I just need to dislodge one or two posts, and the rest will flow out like water.
This may or may not cue a nasty bout of blogal diarrhoea. Guess we'll have to see.
* some of them even bloggable

{ Comments on this entry are closed }