Yes, I stopped 'blogging' and moved to Google+ for just over a year (I referred to it as social blogging) but that wasn't why I stopped posting on my own site.
I had become disillusioned with the process, with the quest for perfection, with making everything an essay. I tried to rein it back by posting "thoughts" (shorter posts) but needed to step away.
Moving to Google+ allowed a certain amount of freedom and reflection even if the #write365 project took its toll on me. I felt (and still feel) that I needed to see things from the outside to work out what I was going to do, what I needed to do; to realise what blogging really meant to me.
It's Only Words, at last!
It's been over a year of procrastination and faffing so I thought I'd finally put my "book" project to bed. I was going to properly self-publish It's Only Words but that would involve getting permission to reprint sections from other people's works and I don't think I want to put myself through that process and incur even further delays.
Instead, I'm just going to make it available here via the blog for anyone who wants to read it. I'll create a separate page for it over the next couple of days but, for now, you can use the below links:
The EPUB version won't open in Apple Books (it just doesn't like it) but seems fine in any other ebook reader.
For anyone unfamiliar, It's Only Words is me putting to rest the thoughts, ideas, angst and anguish that came with my #write365 project back in 2014. I vowed to write something, anything every day for a year of around 300 words. The subtitle is "Lessons learnt from a year of writing" and that is how this is presented.
That project became intensely personal and surfaced a number of issues for me (triggering extended mental health problems) so "Words" is a way of putting that all behind me.
There may still be typos or grammatical errors. It may not make perfect sense. You might enjoy it or hate it, agree with some points but vehemently disagree with others. That's fine — it's a starting point, a conversation starter and, more importantly, therapy.
I'm happy to finally share it with the world. Even if no one reads it at least I can say "I did that. Me!"
I've not posted this consistently since the #write365 project back in 2014, I think the most I had achieved in a row was about 200 days. The way things operate now I can't see any reason why I wouldn't post on any given day short of being physically unable.
The past couple of days have seen progress on the final chapter of (or should I say conclusion to) the writing project. I have used extracts of posts from the #write365 project all the way through (they serve as a foundation for the whole thing) but yesterday saw me using the whole of one particular post, albeit with a slight rewrite. It laid out a story that perfectly introduced what I didn't previously know I was trying to say.
This morning, I started adding a couple of bullet points to my notes and had somewhat of a revelation — some may see it as overly twee but I believe it encapsulates my entire message in just a couple of sentences. I suppose that's the thing with conclusions, they're supposed to bring the threads together in such a way that you don't really need to read everything that comes before. Intro and extro, everything else is decoration.
