An apology, an excuse, and a proposal

Hello,

I am sorry for abandoning you all. Indeed, I have been absent so long that you probably assumed my blog was dead, and had become yet another fallen tree in the forest which is WordPress. Actually, the tree was only hibernating. It lost all its leaves, certainly, but it was not completely dead. Now Spring has come (I hope) and perhaps the tree will gain some leaves again. Either that or (which may be more likely) I will post once or twice in the next week and then we’ll have another long winter.

I have given my apology, and now I must give my excuses. (For, you must know, I don’t really want you to forgive me — all I really want to do is to prove to you, by whatever flawed means, that I was not actually in the wrong.) This last nine months have been the busiest of my life. “Back to Cambodia,” I thought a year ago, “back to where I will have time to read and to blog and to design board-games, and to run as much as I do already”. Not so. I began distance education in January, and I realised then that I had previously been taking life easy. Since then I have had little time for pleasureful pursuits, and since I am clearly not made of the same stuff as Miriam Joy or John Hansen or other teenage writers I could mention (who manage to go to school and do extracurricular activities and write novels and blog) my spare time has been taken up with less mentally engaging activities and my blog has languished.

However I want to begin using my blog again. I believe this is more realistic than it would have been six months ago for two main reasons.

Firstly, I discovered during exam week in late September, that one does not really need hours and hours in order to write something worthwhile. Even if you don’t spend ages thinking of everything you want to write, nicely arranging it in order, and then following your outline closely as you write, you may still be able to write something which is of value to yourself and to others. By spending less time on each blog-post, using the same amount of time, I will be able to write more blog-posts! (isn’t maths wonderful?)

Secondly, I have discovered markdown. I often have a lot of trouble connecting to WordPress sites, which sucks. Often I want to write a post, but discover that WordPress won’t load so I can’t go and write it. Now I will do all my blog-writing in some plain-text application in markdown whenever I feel like it and just publish it when I happen to be able to access WordPress for a sufficient length of time.

In terms of what I will write: I can’t say I know for certain. But since the blogging community I feel somewhat connected to is a teenage writing community, I will probably post some book reviews, some ideas I have related to novels and writing, some short-stories, and then a bit of whatever other ideas my meandering mind thinks should exist here. Right at the moment I am thinking of writing some posts on saving time (or wasting, it depending on your preference — simply do the opposite of what I suggest), as much for my benefit as for yours.

And that is all. May the doom of Mandos be ever in your favour.

Leinad