I have a couple of little detours before I actually get to the start of this particular blog, but I think they're worth it. First, is it just me or did I suddenly get a bit more Northern? Has it happened slowly since I came back up here? I'm not sure, but occasionally I catch myself and think, yeah, this is a thing that happened whilst I wasn't looking. The second thing is that I have a terrible joke. I used it for the first time when I volunteering at the women's football Euros tournament and honestly, I think it takes too much explaining to actually be funny, but I still love it. One of the proper Northern things I've started doing is saying, mate, I'm fuming, A LOT. I don't get p*ssed off anymore, I'm just fuming. All the time. That's how I term it. Anyway, my daft joke is, if I were French I'd be smoking. Because the French word for smoking is Fumeur, so it makes me think of fuming. I did warn you it was terrible.
Anyway, writing that last blog post was feeling like a victory and I went to copy and paste it from 4thewords (there is no better accountability partner for writing in my eyes) and I pressed something stupid and it disappeared. I'm there clicking back, undo, and all sorts, and the damn thing is not coming back and I thought sh*t, really, again?
Sidenote/ third random tangent, I've tried, for the most part, not to swear in this blog before because it's not like it's age-restricted or anything like that, but at the moment I'm focusing on just writing. I am still ****ing letters so it's not the full thing spelled out, but at the moment, the most important thing is getting on with the writing side because of how long I spent not writing and how much that has an impact on me.
If you've been reading the blog for a while you'll know that loss of words is a thing that has happened to me before, during NaNoWriMo, outside of NaNo and honestly, it seems like I never learn, but I do learn, because the next time I lose something, it's in a different way. I learn a lot from it, but something else goes wrong the next time and there are the same results. Every time it happens it's frustrating because I'm not often a person who writes with a plan, so when it's gone, it's gone, and it's not like I can just look through my notes and recreate whatever was there. It would be particularly difficult because, as you can see from this blog, my mind wanders off at will, and sometimes the things which "trigger" a wander at one point won't do the same again, or if I think too hard about a word, it's like something is blocking it. I've been describing it recently as my brain handing my crossword clues, I'll be having a conversation with someone, half think of something and not be able to "get there" to the point of finding the word, and be saying things like 'it starts with a B', 'it sounds like Heffalump - it very rarely sounds like the thing I think it sounds like, but my brain has inextricably (and sometimes inexplicably) linked the two things together - 'that place I lived in London' (I lived in many places in London, and this doesn't narrow down was it a town, a street, a house, a flat...) Thankfully, I spend quite a bit of time with my mum, so when this particular brand of cerebral paralysis strikes, I say these clues to my mother and she reminds me of the word after not too much unpleasant mental gymnastics with me trying to fiddle my way through knotted neurons and navigate a new pathway to what I'm trying to say. Granted, even when she reminds me what it is, I'm relieved, but also vexed, because this little phenomenon is pretty new, and I don't like it.
I think it's because I've been struggling to write for a while or to find the words to express what I'm thinking, losing blog posts can feel less emotionally charged than losing a novel draft, but it also feels quite silencing, even if it's not that someone has intentionally done something to make it disappear. It's more vexing than devastating. I was annoyed and I wanted to throw something, though that might also be that I have some pent-up energy and frustration that I once channeled into running, the desire to run has eluded me for a while now. Though as writing has also been a struggle and I've been finding a few other things difficult, I wonder if it's just been a general mental struggle and I'm only just starting to process that, which is challenging because one of the reasons I write is for the benefit of my mental health and one of the reasons I run is exactly the same. Anyway, the blog survived, I'm surviving and in the background of it all I have actually started work on a new project which is humming away to itself and the cogs of the idea machine are whirring again, instead of just grinding and spluttering and refusing to pop anything out at all (which means that the ability to come up with anything of merit or anything interesting is literally nil.)
Before I know what is happening, the next few months of business will be over and it'll be NaNoWriMo kind of business, and I may or may not be looking again at breaking my own records, writing too many words in too short a space of time, sharing my love of writing with my Scout-y youngsters and also be driving down to London at least once, because I prefer my car to a train, and I much prefer being able to just get in and get going, as opposed to the bus, walk, train, change, walk, stairs, tube, change, walk, etc that the journey is every time I visit London without having my car with me. Hopefully, this year won't mean any lost words and may mean writing something else I actually want to commit to editing. It's been twelve years (well, it will have been by the end of November) since I wrote Fairies and I struggle getting my head around the fact that I haven't written anything else I liked that much since. Oh to be seventeen again and not overthink what the world may think of the thing which I am putting out for them all to see.
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