New Year, New Post

Should I begin this blog entry with the words “It’s been a while since my last blog post…”? Looking at the date of the last blog I wrote, it certainly has been a while – 17^th June 2022. Two and a half years ago, to be precise – but that would probably be a bit too cliched, too unoriginal.

Perhaps I should start it with a pertinent literary quote, like - “What’s it going to be then, eh?” or “You’ve been here before. Sure, you have. Sure.” But that would probably just be over-egging the pudding and perhaps a little pompous.

Let’s just simply settle for “Hello! How ya been?”, shall we, and we can go on from there.

It’s strange how you lose all focus of time when you no longer use social media. I shut down all my accounts back in late 2020/early 2021 and have been much happier since doing so. I was getting a little sick of the In-Love-With-Being-A-Writer Brigade*¹  and those passive aggressive braggers who do nothing but show off about their upcoming projects*². I’d seen a couple of those magazine articles with titles like “How shutting down your social media accounts right now will improve your happiness and your life”, and had been turning the idea over in my head thinking it might not be such a bad idea, so I gave it a go and, would you believe it, something I read on the internet turned out to be true!

Imagine that!

At first I only temporarily closed them down, thinking that if I found that I just couldn’t go cold turkey and needed a quick fix then I could fire them back up again and continue where I’d left off. But I found that I didn’t need them. Eventually my Twitter account deleted itself (that’s what happens if you don’t sign in every couple of months or so), but I found that I didn’t mind one bit. In fact I thought “Good riddance!”

Now Twitter isn’t Twitter anymore, it’s changed itself to some nonsense called ‘X’ and it’s owned by Space Karen, and if stories littering the internet are even halfway true, then it’s in a sharp decline, polarising its users and is a hotbed of unpleasantness.

I say again – “Good riddance!”

But, it’s not just the removal of social media from my days that has caused a strange kind of drift in my life.

My leaving of all social media coincided with the Covid pandemic, which had an odd destabilising effect on my work. Whereas many writers and artists quite rightly chose to view the sudden forced confinement in their homes as a positive rather than a negative, seizing the opportunity to turn a horrible situation into a something productive, it had the opposite effect on me.

For me, Lockdown was not the same experience it was for thousands of others. My wife works in Health Care - not in a hospital or doctor’s surgery, thank goodness, but still in a very important, demanding and (at that time) gruellingly overworked and, therefore, awful sector – so we were not actually confined to the house for weeks on end. We did not have the opportunity to lock ourselves away. Every morning, my wife had to get up and go to work as normal. The only difference being that the streets she walked through to get to and from work were eerily silent and empty, and the work she was doing had suddenly become a thousand times more demanding, stressful and unpleasant*³. For my part I spent most of my time making sure that everything else was taken care of.

I always do the cooking and cleaning in the house anyway. As I work from home, I prefer to be the one who does all the domestic heavy lifting, so my wife can come home and relax. But during Covid, I found myself making sure that my wife had to do nothing else but go to work. If anything needed doing outside the house, I did it. She was already exposing herself to Covid through her constant daily contact with the general public, and I didn’t want her to have to put herself at any more risk.

In short, I became distracted by Covid and as a result it knocked me out of my writing routine. And, if I’m honest (which I always try to be on my blog) I’ve never truly got back into those routines.

I’ve started drifting further and further from the bank, being slowly carried out to see, the land receding at my back.

But all that stops now. New year, new me.

No, let me put that another way. I’ve never really done the New Year’s Resolutions Thing. Never subscribed to the shedding of an old persona and changing your ways just because it’s 1^st January…and I’m not going to start now.

So, this isn’t a ‘New Year New Me’ thing, but rather the opportunity to finally halt something that began 3 years ago and needs to be kicked into touch before I drift away too far. In fact, to carry the metaphor to its ridiculous conclusion, I’ve finally sent up a distress flair and the Life Boat is currently speeding out of the harbour on it’s way to bring me safely back to shore.

OK, so that’s that off my chest. Tomorrow, I’ll be blogging about what I’ve been reading since I last posted here and what I’ll be reading next – classics, modern classics and SF titles abound! Also news on writing project, etc, and my Top Ten Books of All Time!!

Stay tuned!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTES:

1 – See previous blog entry for details.

2 - I’m not talking about those who promote their work, there’s a difference (those who tweet links to where you can buy their latest/upcoming release is completely legitimate and, let’s face it, what social media is best used for). No, I’m talking about the ones who pretend to complain about all the work they have coming in, but are really just showing off about how much work they have and how in demand they are, you know the sort – “I’ve got a book coming out next month that I have to go out to promote, I’ve just had to lock myself away for the past few weeks without any sleep to deliver a TV script, and now a publisher is pestering me to write 3 new novels for them which could turn into a regular thing. I’m just so tired and annoyed, I want to say no and have a nice holiday, but my agent is pushing me to take the deal.”

3 – Thanks, in no small part, to the general public becoming nastier, childish, and a hell of a lot more selfish. Thank God this wasn’t the Apocalypse Event that many pandemics are portrayed as in films and TV shows, the sheer weight of selfishness and childishness that was displayed throughout the crisis would have meant we would have been well and truly fucked had this been much more serious than it was!