Blogging? Who blogs anymore? Maybe I do...

I mean, seriously, does anyone but Chuck Wendig blog these days? Chuck's blog is one of the best out there, but who else has the wit and wisdom to come up with something interesting to say every day, every week, every month?

Every day? Every thirty seconds, more like. The social media barrage has gathered such a pace, such a volume, that I can barely endure it. As the environments of Twitter and Facebook become more toxic, more frenetic, more cluttered, as the spite and bile congeals in the cracks between them, I find myself less willing to spend time there. Those platforms stole me away from blogging over the last ten years, their quick-hit-instant-fix natures seeming more alluring than Blogger's more considered approach.

But now I'm hankering for more substance, not only in what I take in, but in what I put out. I am giving serious consideration to beginning to blog again. I used to blog every day; in fact, over on my old blog - conduitnovel.blogspot.com - I gave a blow-by-blow account of writing not one, but two novels, from start to finish. I shared my experience of finding a literary agent, a publisher, my debut novel's publication, my first reviews, my first award, and then ... it all fizzled out.  The sugar rush of Twitter and Facebook made Blogger obsolete.

(An aside: Clicking through those links, one can see how quickly I slipped from wide-eyed wonder to jaded hack. Like, weeks. Jesus. But also, looking back through ten-year-old blog posts reminds me of the sense of adventure there used to be in all this. Maybe I need to try to reconnect to that...)

Skip forward almost a decade--

(Wait, hang on, I just typed then deleted the phrase "fast forward" and replaced it with "skip forward". "Fast forward" seemed arcane. My God, time is cruel. Actually, I suppose it should be "scrub forward", shouldn't it?)

--and now I find myself writing my first blog post since late 2017. Before that, I'd been blogging roughly once a year. Not so long before that, I'd been blogging once a day. And I find myself missing that. It used to be I would find a kind of therapy of pouring out thoughts at the end of a day and, surprisingly, finding that a handful of people were actually interested in what I had to say. And I was interested in them. We formed a community of writers and editors and agents, some of whom I'm still friends with today, some of whose homes I've recently visited and been introduced to their new baby (Hi, Moonrat!). I've made lots of friends through Twitter and Facebook too, but it feels like the days when those platforms were any good for meeting likeminded people have long since passed.

So here I am, thinking about blogging again. What will I blog about? Whatever the hell I want, is the short answer. I suppose I might blog about the writer's life, though other people - most notably the aforementioned Chuck Wendig - have that well covered. I might blog about movies, though the internet is not short of opinions on that medium. Most probably I'll blog about my number one passion: guitars. Playing them, collecting them, customising them, repairing them. Guitars, guitars, guitars. And my band, the Fun Lovin' Crime Writers, and what a sanity-saving joy my bandfamily is to me (bandfamily is a word, don't pretend you don't know that). Yes, if I blog, there'll be a lot of that. And steak. I could talk about steak until the cows come home (eh? eh? steak? cows?), how to choose a cut, where to buy it, how to prepare it, how to season it, how to cook it.

Yep, there's lots I could blog about. You never know, I just might do it.