Hiatus, & a change of pace

I read this article once about making your blog interesting to readers. It told me that I’m not to say things like it’s been a long time since I posted.

But … it’s been a long time since I posted.

In general, this is a blog about books and my reading habits and my thoughts on reading. I didn’t set out to write a blog about my life because … well … I didn’t. But books and reading habits and thoughts on reading are all wound up in this thing I call my life, and so, inevitably, they are going to end up intersecting at some point.

So. Long time since I posted. Mostly because my life ‘flipped-turned upside down’. I changed jobs, and I changed cities. I no longer have a relevant library card, and rely heavily on my phone’s GPS. And during all of this tumultuous change, I’ve read some chick lit (bad chick lit), some thrillers (mostly bad thrillers), and some of my old books from when I was a kid (Nancy Drew, hells yeah!). Not too much to comment on with these. I’m still in the learning stages at my new job, trying to pick up on not one, but two software packages; a seemingly endless parade of names and faces; mulitiple departments with multiple protocols — I’ve been told it’s okay if I feel new for a year. And quite frankly, until I feel like I’ve got this, I’m continuing my brain junk food. I’m rereading the Sookie Stackhouse books. Ah, Charlaine Harris: not the best writer in the world, but entertaining enough, and if I fall asleep reading (which happens very frequently now), it’s pretty easy to reorient myself within the story.

But still, this is not the stuff of interesting blogs, unless I wanted to spawn some sort of fanfic symposium. Which I don’t.

So then, what to do with this ol’ thing? I got to thinking about why I even started it in the first place. Once upon a time, I wanted to be a writer. I always knew I’d have a full-time job and that writing would be a labour of love that I would probably never actually support myself with. I had small dreams of publishing a novel that at least my family and friends would buy, and even very possibly, read. But somewhere in my mid-20’s, I followed my life down a darkish path, along which someone told me that I was a bad writer, that nothing I wrote about was interesting, that I’d be better off putting my focus into something that actually made me money.

That was a crappy thing to hear; crappier still is I believed it. Now, almost 10 years later (how did that happen?), I’ve got this ghost of a dream and 20,000 disjointed words. I used to write 2,000 words a day, or more; now I’ve averaged that a year.

So I’m going to go back to that 20-something-year-old girl inside (that teenaged girl, that 10-year-old girl; this was a lifelong ambition), and convince her not to give up her dream. And I’m going to use this blog as a forum to exercise my writerly dreams. I guess I’ve always had this idea in the back of my head.

Welcome to my Creeping Thoughts.