The small things in life

There are days that life just seems drab and meaningless. What is the point of all this struggle? All my life I had one dream – to be a writer. I did not particularly want money. I did not want children. I just wanted to write a novel. Now I am almost 35 and the dream seems further away than ever. I organise events about economy for a living. I have a boyfriend who is going through a bad patch for the last 5 years. My dog does not want hugs and cuddles, he only wants to play fetch. Life feels exhausting.

What happened to my blog?

My inspiration fled and hid in at the bottom of a well somewhere. That is what happened. 

You might have noticed the infrequent posts, but what you have not seen is the aborted efforts in the back end of my blog. Among others there are a couple of drafts about autumn, one about a documentary I saw recently and another about the caffeine levels in tea. I do try, but tapping my fingers on keys seems only to produce clunky boring text, wholly unfit for my precious blog.

An Unlikely Encounter

This post is written in response to this week’s Weekly Writing Challenge: That’s Absurd. The challenge asks us us to incorporate something absurd or surreal into our post. 

Happy Birthday Tea Books & Thoughts!

One year ago I wrote my very first blog post. After pressing the publish button I covered my eyes with my hands, as I always do in similar situations, as if to shield my eyes from some horrible consequence. How did I dare make public something I had written? Why did I think my silly thoughts were worth sharing with the world? I might never had pressed that button had I known that people would actually read my blog.

The woman on the bus

This post is written in response to this week’s Weekly Writing Challenge: Person, Place Thing. The excerise is to pick a person, a place and a thing and describe them for possible future use in fiction. It is a good exercise for me, since I need to practice taking the everyday and using it in my writing. I was not able to follow the instructions completely, having no time to go to a café or restaurant this week, instead I did my observations during my 10 minute bus ride home from work.

The thoughts of a Freshly Pressed introvert

Yesterday my poem Boredom? was Freshly Pressed, and since then my iPod Touch has been going *bing* or *pling* every few minutes, notifying me of likes, comments and follows. The sound makes me think of Super Mario jumping to catch money, but of course what I gather is far more precious than money. Writing something and finding that people like it is a dream come true, although the introverted and shy side of me blushes like mad, and feels like hiding her head under a pillow, when reading the comments.

And 50 blog posts later…

Today I’m celebrating the fact that this is my 50th post. I can’t believe I wrote so many posts already! It is 18 weeks since I began my blog, which means I have written an average of 2.78 posts per week, which is quite good, but definitely not as good as the 3.25 posts per week average I counted after November. My pace has slowed lately, for some inexplicable reason, and by now I feel I can’t even blame the puppy any longer (as I did in The Puppy excuse). I will try to do better in the future!

In itself, objectively speaking, the number 50 does not have any special meaning. The meaning is in its special relation to the number 100. Being at number 50 feels significant because it is halfway to the milestone of 100. While, in fact the number 100 is not in itself particularly important, outside of the meaning given to it by humans. The conclusion is that this post celebrates an in itself insignificant event.

This imaginary milestone gives me a reason to look back and take stock of my blog. Analysing the use of the “like” button, as well as the WordPress statistics, it seems that book related posts are the most popular, followed by posts about my puppy. This means that my readers have pretty good taste since there are not many things better in life than books and puppies. Although tea should be included in this list, I believe. There were a couple of posts that I enjoyed writing that did not really receive a lot of visits, such as Some thoughts as winter approaches (the title says it all) and Imagine Heaven, which deals with the grief I still feel about the loss of my mother.

Ok, enough analysing my blog for now. I will try to write another post soon.

P.S I’m proud of myself for resisting the temptation to give this post a 50 Shades… title.

Procrastination by Blog

As I explained in an earlier post, my blog was a way for me to begin writing again after a long spell of writer’s block. And it worked. 44 posts later I can definitely say that I am writing. What my blog has not achieved is to help me write my novel. Instead my blog has become another way for me to avoid the intimidating novel-project. I am so busy writing my blog, that I no longer have time for a novel. Or at least that is what I tell myself.

Today I decided to make an attempt at one of my novel ideas. I opened the word document, and read the first paragraph of what I wrote last time I tried my hand at the project. And then I promptly closed the document, horrified at the utter rubbish I had written. Now I do not know whether what I wrote was really that bad, or if the pressure of a novel is so big that I am overly critical. Is it really possible that I manage to string sentences together into half-way decent text on my blog, while the novel sounds like the writing of an 8-year old?

Whatever the truth of the matter, the fact is that I have escaped back into the safety of my blog yet again. I will have to take another look at that page someday in the future, but having been traumatized by my lack of writing skills today, it will probably be a while before I dare double click on that icon. Meanwhile I will keep busy here. At least it is productive procrastination!

The last day…

It is the last day of my holidays.

I wake up, and long to linger in bed, wrapped up in the comforting softness of my blanket. Tomorrow the alarm will break my dreams and drag me kicking and screaming from my slumber. I should enjoy this while I can.

But this is the last day of my holidays. I should not waste it by lying in my bed all day. I should take advantage of the hours of freedom that I have left.