Jun. 1, 2022
I began writing this post after realising that it is the first of June and I might as well attempt once more to write a post every day. The speed with which the first of the month comes around, inviting another such promise, always amuses me. But at the moment I am not sure whether this blog will still exist come the end of the month. I think I want to start again in pastures new.
Until recently I’d always viewed the fact that I’d ‘kept on blogging’ as something of an asset. I often feel that the torrent of social media grounds us in a permanent now, holding our attention but not giving us much in return. To have a blog with intermittent posts spread like stepping stones through almost twelve years feels like a rebellion against that. This blog allows me to present a line from then to now, to say “here look what I have done”. It’s not very much, but at least it’s my not very much.
However, I am also starting to feel that these milestones are becoming millstones. Everything I want to write seems unduly influenced by what’s already here. Which is kind of silly, because I don’t refuse to read a book because of all the others I’ve read. But then again, you don’t get someone showing up with another chapter of their novel. Well sometimes you do, and it’s often not great.
Take my reviews of the Foundation saga, for instance. Now those blog posts would be easy pickings blogging. Those posts would write themselves. And ironically, the later books in that sequence are precisely that phenomenon of an author returning to their readers with additional chapters. The end of my last paragraph will do a decent job of reviewing Asimov’s later Foundation novels. And Asimov wrote those additional novels because he felt he had more to say about that world, but he also did it because it was easy.
Most forms of self-expression are discrete pieces of work. What’s the blogging equivalent of pivoting from portraiture to sculpture? That’s what I am trying to figure out. Not that I really strive for high art, just variety.
Anyway, I’m at the proverbial fork in the road. Do I start a new blog? Or do I let this one ramble on? I’ll let you know.