Nine Hundred Words About Nothing

When I started these Saturday catch-up posts, I thought they’d be a way to get back to what I think of the “good old days” of blogging: you know, the days when blogs were “personal journals”, and you just wrote about whatever happened to you that day, even if what happened to you that day was exactly the same as what happened the day before, and the day before that, and the day before… you get the picture.

I miss those days sometimes. I wrote a bit (well, OK, a LOT) about that in this post, and since then I think I have managed to get some of that “olden-days of blogging “feeling back, partly through doing these rambly, don’t-necessarily-need-to-have-a-set-topic posts, and partly by just reminding myself that it’s OK if not every post gets a million comments. Or, you know, six comments. I did move the ‘diary’ posts I mentioned in that older post back to the homepage, though, partly because my mum kept missing them completely, but mostly because I was kidding myself if I thought I had enough to write about to justify giving them a whole entire section of the site.

The fact is, the vast majority of the time, my life just isn’t that interesting. I look at other blogs, and the bloggers are always at events, or meet-ups, or doing other super-important bloggy things, and meanwhile I’m walking the dog and watching Call the Midwife, and that’s my life, most weeks. And honestly? I’m fine with that. I mean, I get invited to those events too, but I turn them all down, because, to be totally blunt, making awkward conversation (and any conversation involving me has the potential to be an awkward one, trust me…) with strangers who’re ultimately trying to get me to write about something I’m not really interested, in just isn’t my idea of fun. I did that as a journalist, but as a blogger I don’t have to – so I don’t.

I don’t enjoy going to PR events, and I don’t particularly enjoy reading about them on other blogs, so I just don’t bother, and go about my life as usual. And I like it. I really do. And I love blogging – even although it’s changed almost beyond recognition from what it was when I started out. I keep reading posts recently about how blogging is SO HARD, and how no one can ever understand how HARD it is, and and I just think, “really”?  Sure, blogging has its challenges, and I think ANY job has its downsides (I actually have a post scheduled for tomorrow about some of my blogger ‘pet peeves’, just to balance this one out!): if you’re blogging for a living, you’re running a small business, and yes, that is going to be hard and stressful, in ways that only other full-time bloggers will be able to understand. As jobs go, though, it’s a pretty good one: I genuinely love it, and feel very, very lucky to be able to do it, so, for me, the downsides (and there ARE downsides) are outweighed by the many positive things I get out of it.

But it doesn’t really give me a whole lot to write about, sometimes. I mean, some weeks are fine. Some weeks there’s a new gnome in the garden, or a towel elephant in the bedroom, or… I just proved my own point there, didn’t I? People (or some of them, anyway) tell me they like those posts, which is great, but some weeks I don’t even have those kind of things to write about, and that’s when The Panic sets in, and I think, “What if I can’t ever think of anything else to write about, and then I never blog again and have to get a ‘real’ job, in a mine or something?” Because WHAT IF, people?”

This week was one of those weeks. Next week probably will be too. And the fact is, it’s not like nothing has happened. There was my birthday, obviously, and that was nice. There was cake, and there was cava, and there were lots of lovely messages from friends and family, some of which made me want to ugly-cry. (I didn’t, though. I didn’t want to waste my mascara. That stuff ain’t cheap, you know.)

There were also some things, and not just this week, which I would have written about if this was the Ye Olden Days of Blogging, and I still thought it was perfectly fine to just write about whatever came into my stupid head, because it’s not like anyone would READ it, was it? So hells yes, I WILL just tell you aaaallll about that crazy thing my neighbour did, and hey, isn’t my neighbour crazy? Let’s all laugh at my crazy, crazy neighbour! Obviously these days I don’t write that stuff, because that would make ME the crazy one, and also because my neighbour would probably come knocking on my door, all, ‘Who YOU callin’ crazy?!”

There are so many things I can’t write about. And before you all call me out for vague-blogging (Which, as you know, is one of the cardinal sins of blogging…), I’m not talking about juicy gossip or dramatic secrets, or even things that are particularly interesting, to be honest. They’re just the little things I wouldn’t have thought twice about writing about five years ago, but which I have to think a million times about now, and then decide that no, it’s just not worth it. Which I guess is why I currently have 21 unpublished posts in my drafts folder, and worry that I’m going to run out of things to say. Which is funny, given that I’ve just written almost 1,000 words on that very subject. I’ll stop now.

How was your week?