About Blogs, Egos and 1000 worders...

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...thus, provoking another rant, be so warned! I embarked on this year with a promise to myself that I would keep in touch with my inner writer self more ardently than before. 

I started blogging as a conduit for my thoughts and somewhere along the way I got caught up with the hype around it. My blog moved on from self expression to playing to the gallery which mainly constituted at that time of cousins, best friends, the loyal hubby and the odd stranger. I made a few cyber friends, very few I must say, and got blown into a balloon of false pride. "I had to be super good when I write". "It has to be the best or not at all" were the kind of excuses I was giving myself for not being able to do any readable pieces. While I went on to write a few posts in those early heady days, the writing did not, in my eyes, look mature. It did not reflect my uber-cool opinions and hey I did speak about a lo..oot of subjects even then. The blog slowly spiraled down to an ego game. Write a post. Constantly refresh blog page. No comments yet. Continue refreshing. 1 comment. The acclaim is mentioned to my parents gleefully to entice some pats. This strategy I soon realized was not sustainable. I could not take the depression of having mountains of work and paltry or no comments on my blogs at the same time. The all important writer's block is conjured up and the writing is halted. Then a lot of travel happened post which motherhood dawned and action was back on the blog for some time. Only now every other post seemed to have a connection to the antics of the little one. (It somehow continues, see there is already a mention in this post.) I did get a lot of feedback during this phase but what irked me is the manner in which I was getting it. Most of it was verbal, some of it over chat and many over phone conversations. No comments on the blog itself. If one thought I wrote a certain piece well, that person ideally should have left a comment on the blog. What I wanted to explain to them (and I never have) is that comments beget comments. I think, in general blog readers find it easier to say something if they see that they are not the first.  By then the rigors of life overwhelmed me into another hiatus. I knew I had the time if I wanted but all I wanted to do in it was sleep. I wasn’t sleep-deprived or anything,, just plain lazy. Then a habit breaker of sorts happened last year. I suddenly had too much free time on my hands yet I was looking for various alibis to cover up my non-performance as a writer. 

Flash forward to the present. 2012 presented me with a new place, new ideas and a new eagerness. I channeled all of this into motivating myself to write. I have a few ideas including a collection of short stories. All quarter baked and typed in my brain for the exclusive use of my non-existent memory. I am gifted with fore thought. Too much of it. So much that if I dole out a bucket each then I can easily cater to a couple of hundred people. There is a slight problem however, I forget the present. It’s as if my mind has gone beyond today and concluded on what’s going to happen in my life next month and is already tackling the issues arising from future situations. That means I am thinking about the economies of publication, even before I have shortlisted the mode of publishing, long before even writing the stories and leaps before I even think through them. Now I have successfully confused you into wondering what this is all about. To tell you in short, read till the end. At the turn of the year, a lot of apprehensions of 2011 vanished from my mind and in place was a clean slate. 2012 would be what I decide for it. I decided to pick up the pen, stick it in my knot and start typing one post a day. I would write what I want to without bothering to see whether anyone posted comments. Since the social dynamics have changed from the last time I blogged incessantly, I found it meaningful to provide access to what I wrote on Facebook. There is no harm in baring your soul and not getting an echo. I am just happy to note that I have done whatever I could do to get it out there. I have so far deluded myself from going into an "I am not good at it" hole. I have been there done that. It was not difficult to jump into it given my craving for fame. But it has taken a long while to grapple out of it. I now look forward to the everyday challenge of thinking what to write about. The writing itself does not take too long but the thought behind it does. Sometimes it takes me the whole day and I am able to submit the post just in time before the 12 gong. At times I feel like asking for topics that I could write on, much like the essay writing competitions in school. That was simple. If you know what to write about you can fire your imagination faster. (I guess it’s the same lack of creativity which ensured I could never paint even though I used to be a very good "inspired" artist as I was growing up). I am not one for exhibitionism and I think I love to write because it gives me the anonymity and an alley to hide behind my topics and story characters. I hope to continue this tradition well into the second month. I definitely want to extrapolate this into something bigger. 

You may see my blog as narcissistic but that is by intention. I however try to do the occasional story which might be entertaining (But I dont know why they all turn out dark). 

In case you are still on this page by the time you reach here and are wondering what my topic for today was, it was a challenge to write a post which had a thousand words :)