I wasn’t here last week.
One because it’s really hard to figure out what is going to follow a near 3,000 word missive about my dog dying and two because when it came to putting words on the page my brain was spent.
This is the last time I’m gonna talk about it. I did it. I wrote 30,000 words in April. the last 5 days felt like they broke me in some way, but I did it. If you wanna get technical, I was 92 words over and I completed it at 4 minutes to midnight.
I celebrated that milestone by not looking at Thing 2 for the rest of that bank holiday weekend and reading a romance novel in a day because it was May and that meant I could again. It was a long 30 days without them.
I also now get to do that thing that I mentioned a few weeks ago when I was coming to the end of the month and just measure the time that I write. It’s the golden hour between 4 and 5pm at the minimum at least 4 times a week (because I tend to go into the office once a week which means I can’t attend). Then there is maybe the bonus hour of 9-10pm if I both remember or feel like it.
Actually, that is kind of a lie. I need to have some kind of tangible goal just so that it feels like I have actually achieved something and so I do have some other word based goals for this month. Although they’re not so much word count based as they are completion based. I have a couple of short stories that I want to write because there are a couple of deadlines within this month that I actually want to reach because if you don’t have skin in the game then you’re not in the game.
I’ll tell you what else I said goodbye to since I last spoke to you.
My old blog.
I quietly just abandon that blog completely in October last year after a pretty rocky relationship with it throughout the whole of last year. I knew deep down that I was always a writer and therefore it made sense to have a space where I could write, but it became a very chaotic place to be. Add to that the fact that everything that you read about how to build a successful blog suggests that you have a regular posting schedule and that you invest time in SEO and I came to realise that maybe I just don’t care all that much.
Once I had unpacked all the stuff in my head that made me feel like a failure because I was leaving something that I for some reason felt like I was ‘supposed’ to be doing, I realised that I really just don’t care all that much. I wasn’t enjoying it anymore. I was putting too much of myself into energy wise and although I never went into blogging for success, there wasn’t really any engagement with it all. A lot of writing on the internet is just spewing your shit and hoping that at least one other person might read it, but I was so weirdly secretive about the fact that I even had a blog that I don’t even think that one other person was reading it.
I had that blog for nearly 10 years in the end. I’ve probably never mentioned it here before, but I started it in my second year of uni. I was 19 and honestly just desperate to feel less like shit about the fact that uni was not shaping up to be the best time of my life, but maybe was shaping up to be the exact opposite. I figured if I joined a society then I would probably be less likely to go full recluse because I would have something that would get me out of the house.
I joined the Creative Writing Society because it just made sense and I wasn’t remotely sporty at the time so it could be a team sport I join. It was a requirement to set a blog up that year and so I just used my name as the URL and it was a space where the only thing I put on there were the pieces that I wrote in those sessions and then other people in the society would look at it and offer feedback and all that jazz.
Then I left uni with no job and I needed something to fill my days while I spent my time looking for a job (the job I got actually just fell into my lap and is the job that I still do today, nearly 7 years later) and so I went back to that old blog, gave it a rebrand and tried to think of what to populate it with.
It’s worn a lot of different faces over the last decade until this month I finally came to the conclusion that it is time that I let it go.
There was too much mess and shit on there to try and streamline it. In the end, there was something like 800 posts on there and I had been through them so many times updating images, or working on SEO or whatever that I just didn’t have brain space to try and do something with them other than just close the door on them.
Maybe it’s because I closed my WordPress tab sometime last year and really only opened it again just to update plug ins or something, but when it came time to cancel my self hosting plan (Lyrical Host were my hosts and I honestly cannot recommend them enough, they were so responsive to everything and their pricing is really fair) it was just another admin task.
I exported all the files from my blog just to have a back up and then I just…let them close it.
Maybe it’s because I have an imagination that runs wild or I like to create overly romantic scenarios in my head, but I thought that there would be an emotional component to me removing a whole decade of my life and time and energy from existence. But there wasn’t. I submitted the request to turn off the hosting just before 9am on a Tuesday and by 2pm it was done. There were no fireworks or emotions. It just…happened.
There is something oddly symbolic about the whole thing, to be honest. I have had that blog for almost the entirety of my 20s and so closing it just feels like the closing of a certain chapter of my life. There are probably going to be a few other things like that as time moves on and I get ever closer to 30 but they remain to be seen just yet.
I do know that completely removing it from my life has now officially removed this weird sense of guilt I had flowing in the undercurrent of my life that I was just ignoring something that in theory was quite a big part of my life.
It’s not there anymore.
I can move on.
Jumpin’ Jumpin’
What I’m reading - This is going to seem kind of bumper because I missed a week, so here’s what I’ve been reading the last couple of weeks. Love at First Fight - Mary Jayne Baker, which had Much Ado Nothing vibes (I’m a Shakespeare bitch to my core) and I devoured it in a day (as mentioned above). I also finally finished These Violent Delights, once it got going really kicked into gear and I loved it and I am now anxiously waiting for Our Violent Ends to be published (it is out in hardback, but I need the paperback so my series matches, it’s important. I finally joined the Daisy Jones and the Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid hype and well I get it. And because I can’t let you think that I only read one romance novel in all this time, I also read Hook, Line and Sinker & It Happened One Summer - Tessa Bailey which had a blurb that gave me a dopamine hit, so imagine what the actual book did (another quick read, I love reading love, even when it’s a little bit complicated the drama is never all that real, it’s like a hug), Set On You - Amy Lea, The Ex Hex - Erin Sterling which came with bonus witchcraft and Book Lovers - Emily Henry. Oh and I’m also about halfway through Insatiable - Daisy Buchanan. It’s been a very busy month book wise. (as always these are affiliate links)
What I’m watching - I don’t know why it has taken me so long to get on this, but I’ve watched season 1 of Only Murders in the Building, which I enjoyed. Severance set me off on a little Adam Scott resurgence so I finally watched Party Down. Also really enjoyed Crush on Disney+ and finally summoned the emotional strength to watch Turning Red. Who gave 4*Town the right really.
What I’m listening to - Because I really wanted to read one specific article on NYT that just insisted on living behind the paywall, I ended up with a subscription which actually has ended up doing me the world of good (I spent a long time on there the day after my dog died just for something to do - it was a godsend). Anyway, I now get a lot of emails (including recipes which is hilarious because I do the bare minimum when it comes to cooking, but I live in hope I guess. Or delusion.) I have a lot of tabs open and this was one of them, which was an interesting conversation with Tony Kushner. From that, I then just went off on one, so I’ve listened to a lot of Sway episodes (and Michelle Yeoh owns my heart).
Title Inspiration - I could not figure out what the title of this week’s missive should be, so I just settled for this - Everybody - Backstreet Boys