Wasting time pt.2
Having despaired at wasting an hour creating a new blog before disposing of it, I have now wasted another hour updating this blog. Should you be interested in wasting some time of your own, you can now find all of my old blogs linked in one place and all of the fiction of mine that I can find on the internet. Knock yourself out.
Whilst I was at university, I was intent on being published in as many places as possible. Kind of like a writer’s CV. With the internet being what it is, I found a number of places where people would be prepared to put up whatever shit I sent them. This created a certain illusion of success. I felt that I was a ‘published’ writer. Looking back at most of the work, it isn’t very good. I can also see now that it is no indication whatsoever of success. (If anything, it looks desperate.) Still, with my previous post in mind I am mindful to collate everything in one place, so that is what I have done.
Same with the old blogs. I’d like to think I was an early adopter, but really I didn’t blog properly until 2005. Funnily enough, this was about when I started writing fiction. I’ve then blogged patchily in a variety of different places before settling here, where I’ve been writing steadily for the past eight months. This is almost the longest I’ve blogged, ever. Which is interesting, because I’m far less bothered about it than I used to be.
The differences between me as a writer five years ago and me as a writer now are quite marked, I think. The main change is motivation. I found something at university that I thought I may be good at, and pursued it with a driven kind of intensity as a matter of status. I wanted to be ‘A Writer’, rather than wanting to write. Now, I am far more interested in the process of writing, the placing of one word in front of another, than I am about being published. (Not that I don’t want to be published. That would be foolish). I could die with a hundred unpublished ‘novels’ (because is a novel a novel without being printed?) and be happy that I had spent my life doing something I like.
I’m glad I’ve got this post out of the way. I don’t like to be introspective but I could feel it coming on.
