I thought I’d dust the cobwebs off and dip into the blogging corner of my website. I don’t visit here often, as you can probably tell from the lack of recent entries.
Blogging and I are not comfortable bedfellows – we eye each other suspiciously from across the room, and don’t willingly get up close and personal with each other. From my point of view, blogging is a strange and alien creature, which I don’t know how to feed.
No, that’s not quite true – I know the theory of how to feed blogging, but I don’t really have much to offer by way of tasty food. I spend my time in one of three main ways – writing, working at the day job or sleeping. I find the odd corner for eating – got to keep body and soul together for the big three – and I brush up on my social skills once a week, when I meet some long-standing friends at the pub for a quiz (I really should encourage them to sit down from time to time!)
And that, apart from grocery shopping occasionally, just about sums up my life, so what I’m supposed to blog about, I have no idea. There’s the day job, but I can’t talk about that. As for sleeping – we all do that, so I can’t really tell you anything about it you don’t already know.
All of which leaves the writing. I could probably talk about that, as far as my experience of it so far goes. I mean, I started writing way back, in the 1970s, when I was a teenager, writing what’s now called fanfiction. I wrote my own stories for my favourite TV shows, and thinking about it, my stories had a bias towards the romantic, which probably explains what I’m writing now.
Thinking back to when I started, when I was still at school, you might think, given that I write now and I love doing it, that I would have been good at English at school. I wasn’t. A major triumph for me was actually writing an essay long enough to go onto the other side of the paper – and we’re talking handwritten work, by the way. I pre-date computers. To give you a point of reference, the paper I’m talking about was smaller than A4, for readers in the UK and Europe, or Letter, if you’re in the US.
Yearbooks weren’t a thing back then, in the UK, but if they had been, I’d have been “The girl least likely to make a living from writing.”
And okay, if we’re going to be sticklers for accuracy, I’m not making a living from writing yet – that’s why I need the day job I can’t talk about, but I write in hope. And hope’s an important thing, something you should never give up. I hope that one day I’ll be able to give up the day job and write full-time, because I can’t imagine having a life where I don’t write.
If there’s something you hope will happen one day, or hope you’ll do one day, or hope you’ll experience one day, don’t give up that hope.
Ever.
Because you never know what’s around the corner.
