Monday 30 April 2012

it's scary out there

You know, I think the whole reason why I lost the will to blog is due to the fact that the Internet is now filled with SuperMegaBloggers. Bloggers who have books. Bestselling books. Hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. Thousands of comments on each post. Bloggers who are sponsored and have dozens of flashy ads in their sidebars. Bloggers who have things for sale on Cafe Press. Slick design and squeaky clean templates. Photos taken with SLR cameras way out of my price range.

Which isn't to say that this is something I want for myself. I can't handle the pressure or the trolls*. It's just that it makes blogging for us little people a little more harrowing. How do you get read these days? Back in the olden days, people linked to you and you linked to other people and so on until everyone on the Internet knew each other and got together for gatherings in pubs. This little blog is lost in a sea of SuperMegaBloggers. No one knows who you are unless you become Big.

On the flipside, the other reason why I stopped blogging was because I was getting a lot readers. The pressure of trying to think of hilarious and interesting things to say was wearing. I kept having children. I got more tired by the day. My brain ran out of ideas.

So now that I'm getting a little more sleep and trying to get into the habit of writing regularly, I can do it without anyone really noticing. Maybe one day the readers will come back (how?), but I'm actually pretty much okay with wittering away to myself for the time being.

*(That would be Internet trolls, or people who are deliberately nasty to gain attention. Not trolls of the Harry Potter variety, because they're not real. Sorry.)

Thursday 26 April 2012

bleah

Horrible, horrible, grotty grey day out there today. I am so fed up with doing the school run in the pouring rain, particularly with a toddler girl who prefers to take her sweet time in inclement weather. But then when I'm feeling a little down and stressed, I think about that guy I saw today who spends the day spinning the stop/go sign around by the roadworks in town. That must really suck.

Wednesday 25 April 2012

memories

Had one of my sleepless nights last night, and stayed up far too late reading old blog posts. Don't worry, I'm not having some sort of mental breakdown; I was working on the site and couldn't remember when I started blogging (on Blogger. I used to use Notepad and vanilla HTML because I'm hardcore, dudes.) I looked back to the very first post written over 10 years ago, and just kept going.

It's funny because it felt like I was reading someone else's diary. I talked about places I can no longer remember and people I've completely forgotten about. Some names weren't even familiar at all - I think they were other bloggers from many moons ago. What struck me most is how I used to blog. I blogged like no one was watching, which ten years ago was probably the case. I didn't really care if it was mundane or silly (mostly the latter), or how it compared to other blogs and conscious of maintaining some specific level of writing.

It was life before marriage and kids, when Paul and I first started dating and then when we started looking for a house. We went out a lot with friends and together as a couple, I was woken up by kisses instead of an alarm clock, we travelled. Paul cooked for me and we spent lazy days on his sofa in Northampton. I bought my first car. It feels like a lifetime ago, and not entirely my own.

The last post I read before going to bed was about securing our current house. Goodness, look how far we've come. Life changes, we grow up, the daily routine is something else entirely now, but what I want to get back again is the ability to blog like no one's watching. I don't think my life was particularly more exciting then compared to now, but there was a lightness and ease in the way I wrote that makes me think I've become too self-conscious. Self-conscious about what people will think, and about the quality of my writing. It's not really me anymore, and maybe that's why I stopped blogging regularly.

So yeah, I'm back - filling the Internet with drivel like it's 2002!