New Website

Ahhh, and up she rises with seaweed entangled around her ankles after three weeks of bronchitis.  The wonderful thing about having had something like that is you have a renewed appreciation - for breathing in clear and slow with no jagged edges.  Of not coughing up phlegm.  Of feeling the return of creativity and a lessening of fatigue (it's extra weird having CFS and something like bronchitis because the boundaries blur, but my fatigue levels had lifted enough before getting the bronchitis that having it made me feel like I wanted to stab myself with kitchen knives in abject frustration).

I have finally set myself up a writer website, my professional shingle which details my published bits and bobs to date and contact details.  It feels quite good to do this, being something that I've been meaning to do for ages (like my tax - oops, just remembered again!)

I'm wondering - do I wish to blog over there?  I'm in two minds about it.  If I do, it will be more writing-focussed than here, where I just spurt whatever (and the last few years that's been rather black squiddy depressed ink-type spurting). It's set up as a static site at the moment but I'm wondering about whether to start blogging there because (a) I'm barely blogging here and (b) there are so many writers blogging about writing that do we really need another one?

To be honest, I feel a bit disappointed by a lot of writers-blogging-about-writing websites.  I think because there's so much emphasis on the marketing maxim of give them something to takeaway, make yourself useful or else the eyeballs will flick elsewhere that that translates out into how-to articles.  Now, I'm a fan of how-to articles. I read them regularly.  But a lot of them are kind of ... well, depersonalised.  They are all lovely and shiny and you presume the person on the other end of them never has any writing hassles at all with anything.   Because they are set up on a writer's own site, where they're getting clients appraising their shingle and asking them to write for them, sometimes the excess gloss of professionalism tends to feel a little too thick, especially on content marketing-type websites.

I'm really not interested in writing how-to query articles (I'm so bad at querying that at the moment I could only write how-to-query-badly articles - which, now I think of it, could be kind of interesting).  I'm not interested in writing how-to-write-short-stories articles because I don't think I'll get my head around that mysterious space until I'm about 75.  That kind of blogging is not for me; it makes me feel about as deflated as an octogenarian whose Viagra script has run out.

So I've been thinking - if I do blog there, I would like to blog about the inside moves that go with writing.  How it feels.  But not a purgative dwelling on the feels, the sort that feels kind of self-indulgent, just like a big vomit for the benefit of the person who's heaving.  Not like that, but still coming from the inside.  What I'm interested in is the subjective experience of writing.  Of the emotional issues that go along with it and how to manage those in an emotionally intelligent way.  Or something.

I like the idea too of writing a blog that is about what I do to fill my creative well so that I have a lot to dip into when I write.  Using creativity as a means of expression.  I get out of the loop regularly on extracurricular creativity, though, because it takes up so much energy that it goes on the backburner, and I'm scared that if I set something like that up it would become a millstone if my health goes worse.  Plus I'm an amateur at lots of creative practices, but still, that could be an asset, I guess.  And it would encourage me to sculpt again, which I miss terribly, and which I feel a natural aptitude and talent for which I want to explore further.  But even now I realise that in trying to describe a well-filling-type blog, I haven't even begun to describe what I'm trying to get at, at all.

So much of what I wish to write about these days is hazy, blurry on the edges to myself.  I feel like I get a glimpse of it, of the container I could put everything I'm thinking of in so that it becomes more conscious, less fuzzy.  But then just as I feel I've got a grasp of it, it dissipates and falls through my fingers until two hours later or the next day or whatever I'll be thinking about something and it will ping and I will go, "That.  That's it."  I think it's the same thing that I would like to achieve with Liminal if I ever end up getting it off the ground, with a weekly writing meditation group that I would like to run some day, maybe.  If I was to categorise it into philosophy it would be in the realm of phenomenology.  It's something about living in our bodies and our subjective experiences of them being important, giving us meaning, in an age where the subjective is viewed with abject suspicion.

Something like that.

Ultimately, I feel like what I try to do when I write is pan out to the big picture, to connect things together in an interdisciplinary approach in a world that is fragmented and so super-specialised.  I feel in some ways that that's all I've ever been doing here.

It is very odd to keep feeling like you're stumbling forward with something you can't articulate.  Does any of this make sense to you (if you've read this far)?  Does what I'm trying to do feel more cohesive to you, make sense, than it does to me?  If so, I would certainly like your feedback!