Am I still blogging?

At a pre-Christmas lunch, someone asked me, ‘Are you still blogging?’ This person had read my blog in its earlier days and said nice things about it, but I guessed she hadn’t looked at it for a long time, or she would have realised that it’s been a very long time since I last posted. We started talking about our writing, encouraging each other and congratulating each other on our small successes. Soon we were talking about finding time to write. I have a couple of big projects I’m working on, and my writing friend is starting to get a bit of traction writing regularly for a couple of publications. We talked about how we had to decide what things we would not do in order to keep our minds and time focused on our goals.

It’s easy to enter a competition, attend a course or workshop, set up a blog, or join a critique group and then find the work involved takes you away from your goals, not closer to them. I wouldn’t give up my critique group because it keeps me accountable and working towards one of my goals. But I have become more ruthless about everything else. A course or a workshop? No thanks, not unless it will help me get closer to my goals. Another book on the craft of writing? No, it’s time to write, not just read about it.

And that leads me back to the big question, for me, about blogging: does this get me closer to my goals? Sadly, the answer is no, not really, not at the moment. There is such a lot of time involved in blogging, both writing and also reading other people’s blogs. I fell into the trap of procrastinating by spending hours reading blogs. Now I just follow a small number of blogs that I really enjoy and look in from time to time on quite a few others.

Some writers see blogging as part of their writing, a means of expressing themselves. I’ve realised it’s not like that for me. Blogging can be fun; it’s a challenge and rewarding when the stats start to improve; it’s an interesting way of sharing ideas and snippets of information. But at the moment, because my focus is elsewhere, it has become a distraction.

And so I’m going to take a bit of pressure off and stop blogging for a while. Who knows, I might come back to it sometime in the New Year.

A challenge!

It must be serendipity. I was wondering what to blog about when Daniela from the Lantern Post tagged me in The Look Challenge and told me it’s a fun prompt for writers with either a published book or a novel in progress. It works like this:

Search your manuscript for the word “look” and copy the surrounding paragraphs into a post to let other bloggers read. Then you tag five blogger/authors.

Daniela might remember the piece I’ve selected for the challenge because I wrote the first draft for a writing class we both attended a few years ago. I played around with a few extracts from a novel I’m writing, but they all needed context to make sense, so I decided to use this short stand-alone piece instead.

 Blue Skies 

It’s a chill autumn morning in the 1950s. My brother and I are bundled up in our red woollen jerseys that Mum knitted, and Mum’s doing the washing. I’ve just turned four, and my brother is almost three.

Mum does the washing on Monday mornings. She likes to have us within eyesight, which means we’re outside, playing on the concrete between the kitchen door and the washhouse. We can hear the thump of the agitator in the bowl of the brand new washing machine. We’re not allowed in the washhouse for fear that we’ll feed our little fingers into the wringer and mangle our hands and arms.

While we play outside, Mum fishes the sheets and towels out of the machine and feeds them through the wringer into a concrete tub of cold water. She loads the colored clothes into the machine and pushes the lever to turn the agitator on again. The sheets go through the wringer again, into more cold water stained with blue to make the whites white, and then she pushes the sheets through the wringer for the last time. They slide in concertina folds into a galvanized tub, our baby bathtub, ready for Mum to shake them out and peg them up on the line to dry. Mum then does it all again with the colored clothes, and finally Dad’s work clothes, thick with dust from the paddocks and grease from handling the sheep.

This takes all morning. My brother plays with his toy truck and I have my fat doll with hair the colour of ripe wheat and eyes that open and close. Nothing happens where we live. We’re too small to be out on the farm, too isolated to play with other children.

Mum’s carried a load out to the long line that runs from the wattle tree to the gate that leads out to the yard. As she pegs the sheets on the line with hands half-numb from the cold water and the cold air, we scour the sky. Today we’re lucky; in the distance we see a black dot. ‘Look! Look! Over there!’

We watch the dot grow large and silver in the sun. The vapor trail streams through the blue sky, whiter than Mum’s sheets.

We run to the edge of the concrete and look up. I know there are people up there, riding on the plume of vapor. We wave with both arms, willing the pilot to see us and dip a wing in greeting. The people must surely be looking out the window; they must surely see two little children dressed in red, standing in the middle of the plains waving at aeroplanes. I’m convinced they’re waving back.

We’re still waving, still excited, as the plane fades from sight and the vapor unravels and the sheets flap in the wind.

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One of the best things about this challenge was discovering the blogs that Daniela tagged. I’ve only tagged three, but I think you will enjoy them. Here they are:

 Janet’s Notebook
(No, not me; another Janet)

Chris Martin Writes 

Cresting the Words 

 

Where to now

I’m just over three weeks into blogging, and what a steep learning curve it’s been. I started this blog a day or so before setting off on a trip to Europe and spent a lot of time figuring out how to post and how to manage photos. There have been a couple of panics along the way, like discovering several photos had vanished—I have no idea how this happened, but was relieved when John managed to re-insert them.

I set off on the trip with a notebook computer, a memory stick loaded with files and good intentions to make some progress with a couple of large writing projects. I foolishly imagined that once I was away from my usual routine I would be able to capitalise on a burst of energy and creativity. Not quite. The energy arrived but we were so caught up in our travels that the memory stick never saw the light of day and my writing efforts were confined to blogging.

Now that I’m back home, my journey is about to take a different direction. No more faraway places (or at least not for a while yet).Instead, when I’m not busy with paid work, I’ll be sitting at my desk writing and rewriting, battling procrastination, flexing my writing muscles by blogging, and sending pieces out into the world.

Welcome to my blog

I’m just dipping my toe into the blogging world, starting with notes on a trip to the Czech Republic to my stepson’s wedding. He and his fiancé are travelling from New Zealand (his home) to Sumperk, a small town in the Czech Republic (her home), to marry, and then back to New Zealand to live. When our trip is over, I’ll decide whether to keep blogging.