The monumental task for my blog is to edit it. Really. Simple, right? I do it all the time! Well...
I rarely edit once my post has been published. When I do, I leave a note explaining why. So what I do is what's called self-editing, which is essentially a synonym of rewriting.
What I mean by edit, I guess, is more akin to polish. I need to polish this carbon-handed labour of love, because otherwise I grow more afraid of it.
When I grow more afraid of my lifeline, I tend to leave it in the dust (for a while), and then time usually nags at me and I pick it up again, fresh and anew. It's a writer's method that works for me, but it's completely chaotic and it does not get me anywhere in terms of producing works that engages people to read it.
There's a reason this lifeline of mine is looking rather sombre. Rather limited in its social scope. It's a teenager's fever dream, ffs, and I am more than happy to keep it going. Teenagers practically rule the world (and that's a compliment to the teenagers) with autocratic figureheads like Trump and the IMF representing the infantile banks and then there's... me, my teenage self, ruling my life.
I almost veered into the dangerously political again, and I just did that earlier this month with a bombastic blog post titled: "Fuck you, LIBÉRALS. Fuck you, TORIES." which, of course, has barely anything to do with politics and was just a blog post showing off my new bong, tentatively named Azurite (instead of Arsenal because honestly I'm not that much of an English football fan these days - but ARSENAL is technically embossed on it, which I don't mind).
Back on topic.
So I need to go back through each one of my posts, and if it's a freewrite - leave it alone, and if it's not, make sure it's something that I wouldn't mind someone random online reading (as long as they're 16+, which is what this blog is!), or that I wouldn't mind a close friend reading.
That is essentially the balance I have been trying to strike since 2007 on this blog: writing for an audience that I don't necessarily know, blogging of the personal emotions, memories, events, and phenomena I observe, and oftentimes over-analyzing things because I like to write, when I write.
Writing is very much in-the-moment to me (which is one of the reasons why I still have not published a novel, I think). I look at it very much so like a trapeze artist going across the Niagara, but with a rocket-assisted balancing pole that automatically brings you back up if you fall, one way or another. Maybe I write too personally sometimes; maybe sometimes my writing is so dull and mechanical I fall off on the other end, too; but there's always a blank page, a slack line waiting for me to fill with the weight of my words the next day, and that's a great comfort to me. The possibility of having something to write is addictive, somehow.
So there are so many challenges on the way to polishing this carbon blog into a diamond blog. I think one of the major difficulties is that I'm kind of in love with my own writing. It's therapeutic to me, and lord knows I need therapy. (For further reading: over 12 years ago I published a piece on how I use my writing/blogging for good. I'm happy to see I still hold true to my "writer's authenticity", wherever I may find it!)
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| A pigeon sheltering from the wind at Fisher Rare Book Library |
