Every day I reinvent myself. As a person, as a mother, as a writer.
It seems as if it were from scratch, that I have leaned nothing from the previous day, from the rest of my life.
This summer has been hard for our family in many ways, and with CFS the first place it hits me is in the ‘free’ time: the writing has been slow.
The pieces of daily reinvention come from many places, and some of those places are the words of other writers – and bloggers that I follow. It seems to me lately that source has slowed as well.
In others’ words:
Bob Mayer, tough guy, former soldier, writes about being kind because we don’t know what someone else is laboring under.
Patricia Wrede write about the kind of stress that cuts you off at the knees.
Maybe it’s the change in season, and the abrupt change in the way NJ FEELS, and the fact that, all of a sudden, it gets dark at 7 PM instead of 8PM – and I didn’t get out there to do a bit of SOMETHING outdoors.
Eric J. Baker writes on his blog post entitled Self pity never fueled a single accomplishment that “With so many of you on summer hiatus, I’ve been forced to troll WordPress in search of blogs to read.”
And I realize that this fallow period, when it has been hard to keep myself supplied with intelligent posts to read, is an opportunity to look for things within me that might need writing about.
Why blog at all?
I’m so focused on finishing Pride’s Children, Book 1, that I have been eschewing the pleasure of just writing out a blog post and hearing myself think (navel-gazing in progress; you may leave if you like).
The point of putting something out in public is that it forces me to focus my thoughts, clean up my sentences, choose carefully among ideas, and think clearly. Okay, relatively clearly.
Otherwise, I can think vague thoughts, have them churn chaotically in the recesses of what serves me for a brain, and not even realize, for days on end, that I’m ‘lost in thought.’
Is blogging dying?
I don’t know if anyone else has noticed it, but Eric is right: the sheer quantity is way down.
Maybe some of the bloggers are quitting, if not just taking a break. Maybe a few will come back. We will get new ones.
When I mentioned to my youngest that few people seemed to leave comments, she said, “Mom, nobody comments on blogs.”
This is not true – the right posts still elicit many comments – but I have noticed a reluctance in myself to stop and say a word, and maybe that is me picking up the general malaise.
In this world of the wide nets, fashions come and go with terrifying regularity. If something isn’t popular, it disappears. If something is determined to be passé, there is a much smaller number of people doing/reading/writing it.
I’m probably nuts. Probably, most people are hard at work on the next book. Maybe people are just taking vacations (though we are at the END of September already), or having a hard time getting started up again.
I’m tentatively out of the summer doldrums
I think MY break is over.
I spent time this morning in a very odd way: finding the enthusiasm for revising the current scene (18.1, if anyone’s counting), and having it snap into focus when I discovered that what I had been missing was that it is a PIVOTAL scene, and, if I skipped it, or I don’t write it right, the whole chain of logic I’m so carefully constructing snaps right here.
I LIKE the pressure of that. When I’m finished with a scene, if I have that feeling, I feel as if I’ve avoided a catastrophe.
I do write for the edge, odd as that sounds in a mainstream love story. I think I’m back in the groove.
I have words to finish, Amazon et. al. to master, a new website to finish up, this one to rearrange and maintain so it’s easier to find things, and Pixelmator to wrestle into submission.
If the world would just kindly hold still for a couple of years, I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you.
Have you noticed a slowdown in blogging – or do you think I’m all wet?
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