Category: Blogging

November is over and I no longer need to write a new post every day. It’s finished, done, finito. Looking back at what I’ve published and there are some posts in there that I’m pretty proud of, and others that I’m well aware I cobbled together even though I didn’t really have the motivation. But it was a month long challenge and I did it. Kudos and self fives to me!

It’s been a long time since I did something like this; it’s one thing blogging to a schedule as I did in 2018 (3 posts a week), quite another to do it every single day. To that end, having a list of titles provided was more liberating than I thought it would be, even on the topics I was dreading having to write about (hello religion and politics!) I found myself able to construct and firm up some thoughts that I’d normally have left pinging around my little brain as I scrabbled around to write for the topic of the day.

A few years ago I participated in NaNoWriMo – the goal of writing 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November – and managed to complete it even though that felt like a much bigger struggle as it became all encompassing, every evening I sat at the computer with the same base topic churning over and over in my head as I frantically typed and watched the word count rise. It felt like pressure and towards the middle it was a challenge to keep going, the motivation purely to hit a number count, not writing for the enjoyment of writing.

Each of the posts I wrote last month were a breathe of fresh air, given I was free of figuring out what to write about. It allowed my brain to wander and I think the posts are better for it. On the whole I wrote most of them a few days in advance, taking time over the weekends to draft the next four or five, then refining them day by day before scheduling them to appear on the correct day of the month.

And it all started somewhere else entirely.

I’ve been quietly using micro.blog for a few weeks now, mostly just to try it out, prompted by randomly browsing the archives of my own site and remembering a time where I didn’t care about the volume of each post as sometimes a thought can be captured in a few lines of text and nothing else is needed. I started following a few people there and towards the end of October, one of the people Jean MacDonald (a founder of micro.blog) said she was going to try something akin to NaNoWriMo just on a smaller scale and with a randomly generated word being used to prompt one post a day in November.

What a great way to force myself to use micro.blog everyday and so I followed suit and you can view them all here. They’ve been cross posted to Twitter as well, garnering a few likes on that platform which was interesting too.

Quickly after that, in response to Jean setting the challenge, another person on micro.blog – Andrew Canion – said he was doing a blog challenge in November along similar lines and before I realised we were into the middle of the first week of Thursday and I was committed to completing both challenges.

Both challenges have been fun and challenging in different ways; Keeping the micro.blog posts short and succinct has led to some creative thinking and forced me to boil down what I’m writing to only the essential words, the longer blog posts I’ve published here have allowed me to roam and think about the given topic and I’ve learnt a lot about myself on the way too, isn’t it always the way?

Part of me is glad the blog challenge is over, writing a new topic every day is taxing at times, but part of me wonders if I could keep it going, if given a decent list of topics to tackle. Having that focus removes all of the writers block for me, no more staring at an empty screen and hoping inspiration strikes, as each topic was enough to prompt at least a few lines of thought that I could pull together and expand on.

Equally the micro.blog challenge offered a different approach but the same freedom to explore.

Perhaps my occasional malaise about my blog is simply lack of inspiration.

Perhaps I will look to this approach more often in the future.

Perhaps.

For now, I’m glad to be able to not have to think about what I’m going to write tomorrow…
P.S. Did you spot the one that used the first letter of the prompt word to start each new paragraph?

A couple of years ago I sat down at my desk. It was the first day of a dark November and my intention was to write 50,000 words of a new novel, my first. Having written posts for this blog for several years, and increasingly looked to improve the quality of the writing it was an interesting project. Write a book, they said.

I’ve been reading books for as long as I can remember. My father is an avid reader, and weekly trips to the local library are a formative part of my youth. The children’s section was downstairs and it was there I’d head whilst my father went off to roam the aisles. It was liberating to be fully in charge of those choices and whilst I was first drawn to Asterisk and Lucky Hand Luke comic books, I soon started to find longer stories more palatable.

Trillions by Nicholas Fisk was a formative book in my young years, a sci-fi novel for young adults is probably the classification and whilst I can remember little about the story and how it unfolded, it was the first time I read a book and felt that spark of imagination. It stuck with me to this day, the feeling of wonder that something as simple as a few words on a page can transport you to an entirely other place.

My love for sci-fi continued, no doubt feed by my father, with Arthur C. Clarke and as I got a little older I discovered friends at school who also read books. I was such an avid reader (the acorn doesn’t fall far and all that) that I’d rush through school work and ask to go and read, and what school teacher of any repute would say no to that. The Isle of Sula beckoned next, a trilogy I think, set in the north of Scotland, as did the Three Investigators (aka Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Detectives, my first exposure to the great director), Robert Louis Stevenson, and others.

Moving to high school brought new friends and new reading habits and a certain man called Stephen King started to feature more and more heavily. To this day I’ve probably read more books by him than anyone else, although thinking on it it may be a tie between him and Ian Rankin. King has a habit of writing books that a very easy to immerse yourself in and it wasn’t unheard of for me to sit down on a rainy Sunday afternoon and read one of his novels from start to finish before bedtime, even if bedtime in question was beyond midnight.

It’s a trait I’ve retained, when I’m reading a really good book I tend to focus on that over other things like sleeping and eating…

I have no idea how many books I’ve read, I only started tracking some of them a few years ago when I joined a, now sadly defunct, book club. I’d gotten away from the habit of reading, and the book club brought that back alongwith several wonderful books that dragged me away from my everyday life and into their vivid poetry, slapping my imagination back into gear and consuming me as every good book should. It also taught me an important lesson on the art of reading books; you do not need to finish a bad book.

Book reading should never be a chore, yet the act of writing a book certainly seems like one. Those 50,000 words I wrote a few years ago remain in draft, reworked a few times since admittedly, but are no closer to forming a book than they were back then. I even read a couple of books on how to write a novel, the best of which remains On Writing by the aforementioned Stephen King.

One piece of advice he offers is this: “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story. Your stuff starts out being just for you, but then it goes out.”

This latter part, ‘then it goes out’ seems to be where I’m stumbling, knowing that the words I’ve cobbled together onto the pages would be out in the wider world and read by at least 4 or 5 people (who are all family and friends of course). It’s not so much a cause of writers block as writers fear, but that is a topic for another day.

Instead I’ll end and offer some book recommendations. The type of book and writing style may vary but each of these brought me no small measure of joy over the years.

• A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles
• Number9Dream, David Mitchell
• Vox, Christina Dalcher
• The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Claire North
• If You’re Reading This I’m Already Dead, Andrew Nicoll
• And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
• Smilla’s Sense Of Snow, Peter, Hoeg
• Ghostwritten, David Mitchell
• Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel

And for more, check my Good Reads account.

It took ten minutes of chopping – carrot, celery, onion – plus a bag of yellow split peas and some vegetarian stock, add salt and pepper, some more water and, after slow cooking for several hours the kitchen was filled with the wonderful aroma of split pea soup. Thick, creamy, utterly deliciously.

I’ve written about food here before, although I’ve stopped reviewing every restaurant I visit, and used to write even more when I was an active member of the local Yelp community (that got closed down, a fact that still annoys!). It’s such fun to write about food, trying to find more and more ways to describe a flavour, or a texture, or that wonderful combination of both in a dish that simply dances on the taste-buds.

I like food, a fact not lost on my regular reader (hey you!) given how often I talk about my weight for yes, alas the two are inextricably linked given that I tend to eat more calories than I burn.

I’m very privileged of course, living where I live and in a comfortable lifestyle where my main problem is deciding what food to eat, rather than if I will eat at all. If anything we have an abundance of choice, far more than I even remember as a child, especially given the availability of goods that used to only be available in the correct season; that said the seasons still apply, a strawberry in December is not the same as a strawberry in June.

But let’s not get too heavy (pun intended) for food is something that should be enjoyed if at all possible although I am guilty of falling into the “food is fuel” thinking, eating because I should rather than I want to. Thankfully that’s exception rather than the rule, and so most days I eat tasty food that is good for me.

Oh yes, I may be overweight but that’s not because I constantly eat bad food, my breakfasts are typically porridge and fruit (with a skimmed milk, sugar-free vanilla latte), my lunches either freshly made salads or sandwiches (not bought from a supermarket) and my dinners are typically cooked in the oven, be they chicken and veg, or just a bit plate of roasted veg (admittedly with some butter but hey, we gotta live!).

No, where I fall off the good eating wagon is the snacks and the chocolate and the desserts. Too often I reach for something sugary, a sweet tooth inherited from my father, and too often rather than one or two little things, it’s four, or seven, or an entire pack.

This I know, and this is the daily battle of emotional willpower versus intellectual knowledge, and even though most days my intellect wins (a rarity in itself!) the days were my willpower collapses completely tend to undo an entire week or two in one fell swoop. I do not fall lightly (because I’m overweight! Ha ha, look at me, laughing at myself).

And then there is eating out, which can be done healthily but more often than not is an indulgence. I do love a well prepared, well presented meal, and some live long in my memory. There is something about having your senses overwhelmed with juicy sauces and piquant fragrances that really seems to make reminiscing on such meals all the more vivid.

Food is a staple, we all need it, and it always fascinates me to see how different people view it. You see articles about people who’ve eaten the same meal every day for years and year, and then read about people who are moving to an insect-only diet. It is a constant in all our lives, yet every single one of us will have a different favourite food, or favourite cuisine, just as we all have differing dislikes (not to mention allergies).

I guess this all boils down to one thing, are you a sane person, or do you actually think Marmite tastes nice?

Do, or do not, there is no try.

The challenge was to get from the outdoor centre to a specified point a few hills away, and back, before anyone else. Four teams were assembled, all going to different points on the map that only they knew, and we all set out at the same time.

I was the leader of the squad and I did not like to fail. We set off and all was going well, we reached our turning point, where one of the organisers was wanting for us to confirm we’d made it there, and we were heading back, wary of the time as it zipped past, all the time wondering where the other squads were. Were we winning or losing?

About halfway back one of the younger boys started to complain that he was tired, that his backpack was too heavy, his legs sore. After doing my best to lift his spirits and boost his confidence it was evident he was starting to slow us down.

So I took his backpack from him, slung it across my front (I already had my own on my back) and told him that he “had to keep up now” as he had “no excuses”. Failure here, was not an option. As we set off he still languished at the back, head down, demoralised. I shouted at him to keep up.

My name is Gordon and, contrary to that little tale, I am a nice guy. Honest.

Side thought: isn’t that what all nice guys say? And who am I to decide if I’m nice or not, and against what yardstick of ‘nice’ am I measuring myself?

For many years of my life I considered myself, one way or another, a failure. Not in a completist way, but in the far more damaging and hard to detect micro way. Not matter how hard I competed, there was always someone better than me, bigger than me, faster than me, smarter than me.

At school I was in the top classes for Maths and English, but not at the top of those classes. In P.E. I wasn’t great at football, preferring basketball where my height and hand-to-eye coordination could shine through but even then there were two boys taller and better than me.

So I found ways to cope, I picked my battles and worked hard where I was close to the top, eschewing anything that I would immediately fail at. Why bother trying out for the school football team, when I was a guaranteed starter for our house basketball team? Revise and study hard for that English exam, but I’m probably gonna fail Chemistry anyway, so why bother. It’s a crude and basic way to approach things, and I’m still guilty of it preferring to play video games on easier settings so I’ll win, rather than challenge myself to improve and, probably, fail.

Of course, failing is part and parcel of life and it took me far too long to realise how important it is to learn to fail. Dealing with failure is as crucial as learning to win with grace.

Yesterday I wrote about “Trying” and a large part of that was actually about failing and letting that be acceptable. That has freed me up to re-try some things I enjoy as hobbies, safe in the knowledge that I won’t fail at them, because just trying is, in and of itself, very much a mark in the win column!

Master Yoda said “Do, or do not, there is no try” and he is right, well he is right if you want to become a Jedi and save the universe. Thankfully, us mere mortals have less taxing demands so perhaps we need a new Yoda sacrament to be writ; “Try, or try not, there is only fail”, and with that we can learn to fail, and learn that failing is not a bad thing at all.

And, for those who are wondering (and still reading), yes my squad did make it back to the outdoor centre first.

We won.

But looking back on my younger self that day I can see just how badly I failed.

A Saturday morning alarm set for 6.45am.

I try to fight the urge to hit SNOOZE.

I succeed (!) and rise from the warmth of my bed. I have a plan.

Once ready, I head downstairs, eat a slice of toast and rouse Dave, one of our dogs, from his slumber. As ever he gets up and stretches, sleepily padding his way to where I stand in the hall, lead in hand, waiting. I fasten the clips around him, double check my pockets; keys, poo bags, phone. We are good to go and head out in the brisk morning air and start our walk.

It’s early so there are few souls to be seen and those we do encounter are also out walking their dogs. Briefly pleasantries are exchanged and we go on our separate ways. At the park Dave is let off to roam, a little, with his LED collar – essentially for a black dog in the dark – giving away his location. He veers too far sometimes but a corrective call is all that is needed to bring him back to my side.

We walk on, round the park once then back to the street. We head away from home and walk beside quiet roads that are slowly filling with traffic as workers wake and start their commutes. At every gate Dave pauses briefly to check, every shop door is sniffed, the occasional piece of litter consulted, as on we walk.

He can be very focussed – the boy likes to WALK. None of this ambling around for him, no! – and so we pass other early risers who want to stop and say hello but Dave walks straight past, determined to get to wherever it is he thinks he is headed. As we cross roads he pulls one way when we are going another. One day I’ll let him lead us, but not today, that is not the plan.

Another park as the morning light breaks through the trees, a few more dogs to greet this time, but soon enough it’s time to head for home. My stomach rumbles.

The final stop, a final pee, and then we are there, back inside the warmth of our home. Sasha gets up to greet us and I swap dogs, letting Dave off his lead and putting Sasha on hers, she too needs some morning relief but we won’t walk as far, her ageing hips need the rest.

Once done it’s time to feed them both – 8am – and once they’re done it’s my turn. Another slice of toast will suffice for now, they will need their post-breakfast pees soon, so I make my first coffee of the day.

Soon enough they’ve both been taken out again, and I start to prepare the breakfast I’d planned for, scrambled eggs, crispy bacon and toast.

9am is approaching as I plate up and take my seat in front of the TV, just in time for the Rugby World Cup final.

That was the plan.

I’ve been trying NOT to make plans for a long time now, at least I’ve been trying not to micro-plan my day as much as I used to. It’s been working for the most part, but part of letting go of that approach to living, something I did subconsciously for most of my adult life, is also learning to accept that I won’t always manage it but I am trying, and that trying is all I need to do.

And the more I learn to just try, the happier I feel, simply by removing the pressure to succeed all the time.

Now I’m off to watch the Rugby where I hope there will be plenty of tries (do you see what I did there), and no doubt I’ll spend the rest of the day trying to stay awake whilst being very happy to fail (fall asleep on the sofa).