So it turns out that keeping up with blog posts, whilst maintaining a hectic work schedule and secretly trying to carve out a career on the Welsh literature scene, is not as easy as one might have thought! I have, at various times in my life, kept paper-form diaries, and seemed to have no problem writing a few words each day; it’s often therapeutic if there’s lots of stressful, unpleasant and especially unfair things going on at the time. But I guess the main differences are that:
1. The purpose of a paper diary is usually for the person writing them to express their thoughts, and even if they are then read back, it is usually only the person reading them that will be party to their content…with any attempt to turn the diary into published work being subject to heavy editing and creative fictionalisation (Jean Rhys wrote the fabulous Voyage in the dark based on some paper diaries she wrote having been pensioned off by her former lover…but she reworked the diaries several years after the fact, having not published them as Triple Sec, in their original form as planned).
2. But the whole ethos of blogging is based on the instantaneous publication which is true to life, minute day to day; of people following the story as it unfolds, unedited, unabridged, unashamed…and this requires a greater level of on-the-spot-self-reflection than most of us mere mortals are capable of!
One of the things I am finding difficult is to produce edited highlights relating to the focus of the blog; that is to say – Belle de jour was a call girl, so she presented anecdotes and stories from her working life (although she did brilliantly weave in stories and reflections on life generally – I especially enjoyed reading about her holiday when she stayed with J…it made me wish I could do something so spontaneous!) However I am an aspiring author and had originally hoped to present stories from a literary club I was trying to establish: The Inklingettes…however if there’s one thing I’ve noticed it’s that, not only have I singularly failed to establish such a group with any kind of real consistency in terms of meetings and output – which would seem to suggest the blog would be better re-named ‘The Inklingette’ but I do not really do much in the way of producing actual finished short stories or other creative output! Consequently tales of rejection and publication (as uninteresting as they may prove to be?) are as sparse as tales of a happy group of literary-minded friends, meeting at a cosy ‘local’ and engaging in scholarly activity!
One problem, of course, is that I have two cyber-identities and thus two blogs. Each month I ensure I post something on my Welsh blog. Most months I have my column as published in the local Welsh-language newsletter, and for the stretches in between I dig out poems and short stories, some of which have been published, but most of which failed to make the grade in the ‘real world’.
I did of course mull over, at first, the idea of ‘blogging’ as I am here, on that website, thus the ‘traffic’ would be doubled….but then that ‘blog’ isn’t really a blog per say (now that I understand the real meaning of the word) it is more a depository for my creative output. It is a place where anyone interested in my work can go and check it out, see if they like it, offer me a book deal or publish my poems in collections of great Welsh poetry etc. A blog is more a stream of consciousness, a diary, making it up as you go – with not all of it brilliant or worthy of being read more than once. Would this matter? I’m not sure. I’ve agonised over what to do about it for the last few months and I think I have finally decided to keep things as they are. Whilst blogging on this site and only posting my creative output on the other site undoubtedly dilutes traffic and means that I am out of the running for Golwg 360 best blog awards, I feel that blogging on that site would risk obscuring my creative output in the ‘white noise’ of my whingeing about work, money and not being acknowledged as a creative genius.
Having just read back this post and the last couple I think this is definitely for the best. Perhaps I should rename the site ‘navel-gazing of an aspiring author’! One thing’s for sure, this blog will not be publishable in the breath-taking unedited way of Belle de Jour’s diary…she is obviously a more skilled writer than I…these will be useful notes to draw upon though and a useful place for me to try out chapter drafts, when I get around to shepherding my ideas in that direction…
Gadael Ymateb