When I first started this blog, it had a clear purpose: to keep the friends and family I'd left behind in Canada up-to-date on my new life in France. And, incidentally, to make people jealous about all the adventures I was having in France.
In the last few months of my time in Strasbourg, it turned into something else - an attempt, to capture everything I loved about my life there: the history, the architecture, the lifestyle and, of course, our new friends, French or otherwise. If I could write it all down, I thought, at some point in the future I could look at those posts and capture an incredible time in my life.
The flurry of writing I did on this blog reached a fever pitch in the spring and summer of 2006, and then... pretty much stopped. Without Strasbourg and my imminent departure therefrom* to inspire me, all I had to write about was pollution, traffic, and urban sprawl.
What about Sana? I hear you ask: well, of course I had Sana. I also had another site that was paying me to write about her. Not wanting to scoop or repeat myself, I didn't write about my family here. And besides, the world does not need another "Daddy Blogger" (I cringe, even as I type the words) inviting people to fawn over his sensitivity and/or adorable children? Not in my view. The world also It also doesn't need another politics blogger, or entertainment blogger. It does need another Canadian history blogger, but I'm not exactly well placed to write about that from here, am I?
My professional blogging obligations ended with that site. And so I ask myself, why do I care what the world needs? I have been allowing cobwebs to gather on my writing. Why not become a Daddy blogger? There's no better way to record my daughter's lives. Why not write about politics? Everyone likes a good debate, right?
Writing more here might help me keep up on some other goals as well. In the last few weeks I have undertaken to: start exercising three times a week during the only hour available to me (i.e. 6-7 AM). I have undertaken to abstain from the greatest source of joy and spiritual sustenance in my life - yes, I'm quitting peanut butter, in all its forms, until January. I'm going to put in more effort into my freelance writing. AND, I've been harassed into writing a novel. Which is, uh, being thought about very hard.
I might write about those things. I might write about other things. But I need to keep writing about something, lest what skills I have atrophy entirely.
Please bear with me while I get my mojo back.
NEXT UP: Anything! Anything at all! Idunno... Hallowe'en, maybe?
* I was totally expecting spellcheck to tell me I'd made that word up. Apparently I did not.
2 comments:
Is the novel a "write-a-novel-in-one-month-specifically-we-mean-November-that's-the-"Write-A-Novel-In-One-Month-month" type of novel?
(Just asking, no judgement implied.)
At the moment, my peanut butter and jogging fast/penitence is, at work, being called "Ment" (i.e. Mark's Lent) which I deliberately made 2 months long and include a "doing something I hate" component in addition to the "abstaining from something I love" in order for it to not be like the real Lent fasts that my coworkers had done earlier this year.
All of which is to say, I'm too contrarian to participate in NoWriMo (not to mention suspicious of a writing exercise whose participants would find that kind of acronym acceptable). The timing of this is coincidental - Tim guilted/inspired me into it on my last visit - and will take a year or perhaps two do finish if I'm serious. Which, with sufficient nagging, I may be. You want to join in on the "keeping me honest" team? I can't ask Amynah to do it, because I don't want to disappoint her. You two, on the other hand....
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