Monday, April 03, 2006

Ohmigod I've gone and done it!

Well, here it is - my very first - own! blog. Something I have been doing 'offline' for about 8 years, without realising it. I'd write chapters and then email it to interested parties - but only interested parties I'd identified (ie my poor work colleagues or long-suffering friends).

So what do I put in my blogs? Well, the life of a UK folkie - mostly - but also my 'adventures' as a marketing manager, a mother, and as the daughter of a theatrical (in more ways than one) family.

I'll put some background into my profile - but let me just start you off with a quick sample of some of my 'historic' but previously unpublished 'blogging'. I wrote this just a few nights ago, one typically dark and chilly English spring evening (in other words, wet, cold, and nothing on TV).

"I fully understand why so many writers’ careers do not blossom until later life. Unless you are the dogged, determined type who will close the door to all else except your writing, then it is only when you are retired or when your children are bigger that you may find the time to empty your head enough to sit and write!

As I sit here now I am a refugee – from football in the frontroom, from the washing up in the kitchen, the washing in the utility room and from nagging my daughter to do her homework in her bedroom. It is nearly 10pm – the first chance I have had to get near the computer too.

Earlier I hid in the bath – the computer was not free, there was football on the TV and somehow I could not lock myself away in yet another room to sit and play guitar. My creative juices are stymied by my .. well, in all honesty, by my laziness and also lack of space. To be creative I need the feeling that I will not be interrupted, that calls of “Muuuuuuummm…” will not echo down the stairwell, and loud cries of “Goal!” unlikely to punctuate my thoughts.

But I do want to write. As I lay in the bath, before picking up the efforts of a more determined scribe than myself, my thoughts were flowing, my brain ready to pour out its consciousness onto paper (well, onto screen). But laptops and baths don’t go together well, and anyway the word processor was removed from the laptop to make room for music files…"

Oh dear – a rather abrupt end. You guessed it – the shout echoed down the hallway, the husband and son finished their game and my brief, treasured, moments of writing were over. But I've a lot more - with far more interesting subjects too (I think anyway). But don't you feel that sometimes it's that privacy that you lack in order to get creative? So how do I tackle it now? Simple! Publish to the world on the web and be damned. Or criticised, or have my grammar corrected. I really don't mind, but I will be very interested to see if, over the weeks as I gradually populate my currently impoverished blog site, anything I say is of the remotest interest to anyone other than 'all my family and everyone who knows me'.

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