Thousand Monkeys, Ten Years
Ten years ago, OneMonkey (not that he was known as that yet) said, "I've been reading about these new 'blogs', I think you should get one." Dubious, but having learnt in our nearly ten years together that he was not short of good ideas, I let him show me some. Although, since we didn't have broadband, he had to take me to the library first. "What will I write about?" I asked. I've been trying to figure that out ever since.
Back in 2008 I'd been writing on and off since I was a kid, submitting on and off for ten years or more, but I was just beginning to get the odd success and although it felt a little odd (presumptuous, maybe) I did refer to myself as a writer in that first post. Weirdly, right now I'm feeling like less of a writer than I have in a while - after that eighteen months of dedicated writing time I'm back to the situation of those early posts, not quite fitting writing around a day job (even though these days I work four days a week instead of five), procrastinating too much, blogging when I feel like my time would be better spent writing fiction (see also: procrastinating too much). Not to mention that HMRC recently dealt a blow to my self-image by taking away my status of self-employed writer (it's great that they've made it so you have to earn over £1000 from your self-employedness in a year before you need to suffer their bureaucracy, but many a writer's fragile ego is about to get a good kicking, I suspect).
I doubt I'd have expected to keep at this blog for so long, if I'd given the matter any thought at all when I began. When I wrote those early posts, OneMonkey and I lived with our cat in a rented house with a small garden; I think OneMonkey was a student again and we'd both recently been unemployed for quite a while. Because we didn't have broadband, I wrote the posts in a text file (on my desktop computer!) then connected to the internet when it was cheap rate, just long enough to paste the words in and press the publish button. We've moved twice since then, ending up about fifteen miles away in our own flat with a bigger garden (sadly no longer with the cat) and I'm still behind the times with my not-always-on wi-fi and my laptop instead of a smartphone and constant connectivity, but it does feel like I've made a technological leap forward.
I've read nearly 500 books since I started this blog, many of which I've reviewed, quite a few of which I've been given free of charge for that purpose, in fact (man, would I have been excited at the prospect of that, ten years ago). I've been to writing workshops, entered competitions, had stories published, got rejections from more and more impressive places. I've written fiction that must number in the hundreds of thousands of words. I've become a better writer.
What about in another ten years? Will society have reached the stage of direct neural connection to the internet, and will I have upgraded to a smartphone? Will OneMonkey and I have moved again, about to turn fifty (and celebrate our thirtieth anniversary) in a house with a more manageable garden? Will publishers still be dealing with expensive hardbacks, and will I have got my act together and submitted manuscripts of sufficient quality to enough agents that they might also be dealing with me? Who knows, but I'll keep writing and, all other things being equal, I'll keep blogging so you'll be able to find out here.