Happy Birthday

Tags

Blogging, creativity, Getting started, India, Travel, writing

Today is my birthday, I am forty-eight years old.  Here is an ‘old person’s selfie;’ no proper attention paid to angle or pose, no filters, no editing, no makeup and no shame (or at least, not enough to stop me).

I like to have some quiet reflective time on my birthday.  This morning I got up early, did some yoga and then went for a long walk on the beach and thought about writing.  Or I thought about life and picked out the bits I wanted to write about.

What’s on top

I went for a long walk on the beach yesterday morning as well, and I have done some yoga every morning for the past few days.  Yesterday (and so far today) I have had no alcohol and no cigarettes.  I had fallen into bad holidaymaker habits this past week, which I cannot do for the whole year.

I knew my last post was exactly a week ago and I had already decided to do one today.  Then I thought that maybe I should do what I have so far resisted, due either to free spiritedness or pig headedness (as with many of my habits and decisions, it could be either), and sign up to the ‘consistency is key’ advice and post on a regular day every week.

I honestly did not know what day of the week it was today, not in the I don’t know what day it is, think for a second, then you do, type of way.  I mean I really didn’t know what day it was.  I had to remember the last time I knew what day it was, what day we left Hampi, what day my step-son arrived here in Arambol, and work it out from there.  I cannot remember the last time I had so completely lost track of what day it was.  It is Friday today so I shall, for the time being at least, post every Friday.  I may work on it earlier in the week and just finish it off on a Friday or I may write the whole thing on the day, depending on travel, time and internet access.

This will help me manage the demands of writing a book and writing a blog.  Having a once a week schedule is manageable and means I don’t have to fret about when was the last one, should I be doing another one, etc etc.  I remember reading somewhere that the more you can turn over to habit, rather than your own fluctuating motivations, interests and energies, the easier it is to get things done.

I feel like the blog will turn into more of an actual blog, rather than having to carry the full weight of any and all writing I do.  This has meant that not everything has been included as blogs are by nature a bit snappier, like short short stories.  Writing the book means that I can write about things that would otherwise be forgotten, and means that the blog can become slightly more chatty and personal.

If ever I think that maybe young people and their selfies are a bit narcissistic, I can just remember that writing about oneself and putting it on the internet potentially puts me in a glass house.  The blog is where I ask myself how I am and check in with myself.

It will also include a travel update and a writing update.  I will put the writing update at the end so it’s easy to skip.  It will be mainly of interest to other writers who are working on something and to people who are cheerleading me through the process of writing the book (thank you very much for your encouragement, it really does help!).

This will help me have a routine; I’d like to exercise in the morning, write in the afternoons and relax in the evening.  I do find no routine, drinking and smoking anytime, sort of fun but it’s easy to cop-out of getting anything done.  And how lucky am I, or rather, what a gift I have given to myself, to have a whole year where I can create a routine like that?  Or, to be on the more negative side, I chucked away my career and my three bedroom house so all that better have been worth it.  (Don’t worry, it totally is!)

Of course, alcohol, smoking, and general lack of confidence and self discipline can follow you almost everywhere.  I have not come here to run away from myself but I am fully aware that whatever it was about me that got in the way of me taking my writing seriously in England, can still get in the way here.

I can just about say this first month with my step-son out with us, is a holiday but not after that.  That said, I am sure there will be phases of falling off the wagon but I prefer to be clean living and with a routine and then fall off bigger occasionally, rather than a little every day.

Travel update:

We have been in Arambol for a week.  Beautiful beach like Agonda but a bit busier, with stalls and shops and alleyways to explore, and much nicer than Anjuna.  Tomorrow we go to Panaji the capital of Goa, for two nights before my step-son flies back to England and we leave Goa to go to Kerala for the monsoon.

Writing update:

It is going well.  I am working on Chapter Two, which is broadly our first month in India.  As usual I get anxious if I don’t write and yet still don’t write for several days at a time sometimes, but yesterday I spent quite a while on it and felt really good.

As long as I don’t get scared or overwhelmed by the length.  I think it’s helped that I have separated it into chapters, in different documents.  Chapter One, how we got here and some background.  My last book, whilst small, was all in one document and became an amorphous mass that would completely overwhelm me.  I remind myself, I wrote a dissertation, I wrote a few small books, I can do this.  Even if I hadn’t, I could just say it’s like lots of blogs strung together.  I have actually put all the India blogs into the chapter and am working around and into them, adding detail, expanding, linking.

A string of blogs is a good starting point but the writing style is different.  I realise that I can slow down, drill down into things, take my time, allow themes to develop.  I have begun by putting all my blogs and notes into chronological order whilst being flexible about some things being ordered by subject instead.  Things link to each other, for example:

Yesterday I thought there should be a food bit, about the different food we ate at different places (hopefully more interesting than it sounds).  Today on my walk I thought, I could do an animal section and then I came to ‘Dog Temple,’ there a sign with a dog’s face in a star, saying, ‘We welcome you,’ (It was an animal shelter).

Things call back to each other.  The people we met in Anjuna told me afterwards that they said to each other, ‘Shall we ask them if they want something to smoke,’ and the other said, ‘No they are too old,’ which made me laugh a lot.  Today, as I walked on the beach, a man stopped me and chatted to me, then at the end of the conversation asked me if I wanted to buy anything to smoke.  I politely declined saying I am being healthy right now but I was quite pleased anyway!  Especially as it was my birthday!

Thank you so much for reading, see you next week!

 

How to write a blog

Tags

Blogging, Blogging inspiration, First blog, Getting started, How to write a blog, writing, Writing inspiration

I was talking with the lovely J at work about her starting a blog.  ‘It’s just the getting started’, she said, ‘When you’re faced with that blank page, how to start it…’

So I thought I’d write something about how I write.

Trust the process

Trust your own process, that is.  Like child raising, like life, another person’s advice can only take you so far.  You have to find your own way of doing it.  The most important thing is getting started.  Or rather, the most important thing is to start.

What to write about

Or, overcoming the fear of the blank page.  Things I suggested to J:  Use photographs.  Start with a photograph and write a few lines about it.  Take or find a photograph of a piece of furniture that you have restored and write about how you did it, or tell the story behind that piece of furniture.  If you see a skirt or an outfit you like, get a picture and write about it.  Make a note or take a photograph of any ideas you have or inspirations you see.  The more you do this, the more ideas will come.

Find your schedule

Lots of people blog every day, even multiple times a day.  I totally understand why that would be an attractive discipline/ strategy to have.  But for me personally I’d end up getting obsessed, exhausted and resentful about writing every day whether I felt like it, whether I had time or not.  (I realise people probably line up posts and schedule them.)  I also get that it means your post is more often in the WordPress Reader so more people are likely to see it, hence more followers.

However, I limit the number of daily bloggers I follow.  I just don’t need that much stuff to read, and I like to have a variety.  Some people who only post once a week or so, I am excited when a post from them pops up, it never becomes a chore to keep up and it doesn’t clog up my reader with more than I can manage to read.

Niche or not?

Back to J.  She wants to write a lifestyle/fashion blog, but more aimed at an older demographic.  I relayed some things I had learned from a post I read about whether to be niche or not, and the general feeling was that (again, like child rearing, like life) you might start your blog as one thing but find yourself wanting to write about something else one day, so it might be best not to impose rigid ideas or limits as you then might have a wobble when you feel like you are going off message.  The post also said that most readers prefer blogs where the blogger writes about everything and doesn’t just stick to a niche topic.

Be yourself (everyone else is taken)*

*Oscar Wilde

The most important message to stick with is to be true to yourself.  That’s the coherent thread that hangs all the posts of a person’s blog together, even if each one of their posts is different from the other.  Authenticity is all.  I love it when I feel that a blogger is really just being themselves.  To borrow a point from another blog about other bloggers, I don’t mind if I don’t agree with them or if they talk about things I am not interested in.  If they are authentically writing about their experiences, thoughts and ideas, and I like them as a person, then I will keep on reading.

Every post is different

Each of my last three posts was made differently.

For Update, I was aware that I hadn’t posted for two weeks.  Anxious thoughts circled in my mind.  Should I just write something?  Should I make myself a rule re writing more regularly?  Does not writing every day mean that I don’t take this blog and my writing seriously?  Do I want this blog and writing to become something, or not? What message am I sending to the universe, and myself, about my committment?

I batted back these thoughts.  I will not post unless I have something to say, and that something turns into something I am happy with.  But one afternoon, my husband was at work.  I was restless, ever so slightly unsettled, and ever so slightly bored, well as close to bored as I ever get.

So I got into bed, made myself comfy and cosy, and picked up my tablet.  It wasn’t like I had some brilliant idea or point to start with.  My head had been spinning about all the things we’d been doing.  I could just write kind of an update, I thought.  Maybe people want to know the cats are okay (or that I’m okay about the cats, and aren’t still crying about them).  My mum had sent me a photograph of one of the cats.  I had my new tattoos.  And so I started writing.  It made itself into something along the way.  When I had finished, not only was I pleased with what I had written, I also felt a whole lot better in myself.

For the Matrix post, the starting point was my friend’s email.  It was so good, I wanted to put it out there.  It explained things so well, but in a different way to how I do.  So I pasted that in, added a few notes and saved it.  I knew I needed to have my own material in it as well so that it wasn’t just a repost of his words.  Over the next few days, thoughts and ideas came and I scribbled them down in different places:  in my diary, on a To Do list, on my India packing list, on a paper bag on top of the pile at the bottom of the stairs.  I often do this, I can tolerate my notes being scattered across lots of different pieces of paper.  Until I can’t.  On Thursday I spent the evening with my husband then he went to bed and I thought, I’ll just gather all the pieces of paper and type the scribbles into the draft, just so that everything’s in one place, I can finish it properly tomorrow.  But I got into it and even though I hadn’t really felt like it I sat down and finished the post, which had become a long, muddled draft, and needed work, almost four hours worth as it turned out.  Proof reading was done between one and two am on Friday morning, so I am sorry if there are mistakes. (I don’t think there are.  Two things are mentioned twice, but that was deliberate.  It breaks normal rules re writing, but you know what they say about rules, and I really wanted to make sure I made my point.)

Like leaving a trail to follow, like giving yourself hooks, clues and rewards, which I actually don’t do almost as much as I now think it would be a good idea to, the pieces of paper chaos is a method.  I get my ideas down, they are not lost, whether I have them on the drive to work and scribble them in my diary in the car park before I rush into work, or in the two minutes waiting for the kettle to boil, or on the drive home, hence scribbles on the paper bag at the bottom of the stairs, captured before I even take my shoes off and go inside the house properly.

For this blog, I just woke up on Friday morning and almost straight away started having ideas.  I crept downstairs and got my tablet, put off my husband when he called me, pretending I was still sleepy, which I was, but I didn’t want to lose the ideas which were coming thick and fast.  About J, about my writing process, my thoughts and opinions as a reader.  Most of this blog was written in one draft in bed during that session, with a couple of additions that I scribbled on a notepad over breakfast.  Today was just editing.

Timing and scheduling

I’m more art than science.  When I first started blogging in 2014 a friend and fellow blogger asked me what time I posted.  ‘It tends to be on a Sunday afternoon’, I said, ‘when my husband is taking the kids back to London and I have the house to myself.’

‘That’s absolutely the worst time’, she said.

‘Well that’s what time I write it’, I said.

‘You can schedule them to post at a better time’, she said.  I have done that a couple of times when I first started regularly blogging again in summer 2017, but nowadays, when they are written, they are posted.  Yes, I do believe timing is everything and for me, whether it’s sensible or not, when it’s finished that is the time to post it.

Re technology

The past couple of  months I’ve been training myself to write blogs purely on my tablet (Samsung Galaxy), ready for going travelling. However, when I was writing an article, I started using the laptop again, and realised how much easier it was.  Then a fellow blogger wrote a post about getting a Chromebook.  My husband had already suggested that I get one of those, having kindly spent some time researching the best laptops for travelling bloggers, and now I am fully decided that that is what I will buy to take travelling.  I will take my tablet as well as a back up and because it takes good photographs.

Making connections

Everyone says WordPress and blogging is all about making connections with fellow bloggers and readers.  It is, but where to start?  When you go to search and it says, ‘Search billions of WordPress posts’, it can be a little daunting.  I can’t remember how I discovered all the different people who I follow.  The only words I ever remember typing into the search box are ‘veganism’ and ‘menstruation’.  As with the rest of the internet, one thing leads to another and eventually you come across people you are interested in.  I also only ever follow people I am genuinely interested in reading the posts of, and I only comment or press the like button of a post if I really do.  I just feel that the writing and my interactions with fellow readers and bloggers need to be genuine.  I kind of feel that if I stick to that I won’t go too far wrong.

Get to know and trust YOUR creative process

My ex boyfriend used to say that even if he knew the song in his head or half composed on his guitar wasn’t that good, he’d still finish it, ‘to keep the channel open’ he said.

I always have plenty to say, or rather, I don’t open a blank page until I do.  So there may be a gap of two weeks or more between posts.  During a recent two week gap my husband innocently commented that I hadn’t posted for a while, only to be met with me defensively explaining all the other things I had been doing instead.  ‘I wasn’t criticising’, he said.  It wasn’t his fault, I need to trust my own process so completely that I don’t feel even a flicker of anxiety if I don’t post anything for a couple of weeks.

Likewise, when they come, I need to write them down.  Which is why on Thursday night I went to bed at 2am, and why I started writing at 7.45 am Friday morning.

When I get like that, blogging at 2am, up with ideas at 7.45, I need to make the most of it.  In the past, I might have worried that I was going manic, not because I might actually go manic in the pure sense, but because I used to worry about everything.  What if the ideas don’t stop coming, what if I can’t do anything else?  But I know it’s not always going to be like that, which is reassuring because I can’t be writing at 2am and 7:45am every day. (Not right now anyway)

But then when it stops and I go two weeks without having any urges or urgent ideas to write about, I worry that it has gone forever and that I might never write again.

Well I used to anyway.  Right now, I trust the process.  I’m still conflicted about what it all means, what is the goal, what is the point, but I think it’s best not to dwell on any of those things and just write.

 

Thank you very much for reading.