wordpress – Afterwards

Balls to you October

See ya later!

As Blogging months go I really didn’t enjoy October one bit. It was filled with excuses and distractions and I found very little joy in the whole experience and got myself into a bit of a hole with it all.

I’ve been doing this since last July and I was certainly at my least inspired and uncreative but I wont go as far as to call it writer’s block because there would be the presumption that I am a writer and that is something I just cant really come to terms with. It was more a matter of not being able to quite find the time to do it properly.

I started a new job a short while ago so am actually having to work for my money which is a real pain in the arse I tell you and at night I was finding myself far too weary when I eventually sat in front of the keyboard so mostly I just went to sleep instead or sulked a bit.

Now the urges and ideas were still there that wasn’t the problem. My head is always full of dirty limericks and images of stick people finger banging each other and I am never short of an idea for a bit of a story but time just seemed to conspire against me. Or at least I let it.

Interestingly my diet also suffered during the month which I wrote about here and I think maybe that was part of the problem. My discipline in general had gone to pot and across the board I was finding myself unproductive and rather jaded and allowing myself to find excuses wherever they presented themselves.

Anyway, as November loomed I decided bollocks to the excuses and given that I was off today planted my arse in front of the laptop for the day and forced myself to get back on the horse I have so enjoyed riding this last year. I forced myself to write whatever old bollocks I could muster and you know what, I have enjoyed it immensely. It’s hardly great stuff but it’s my stuff and I cracked a smile when I did it and I felt rather relaxed by it all which is great because It has caused me some stress at times which is just ridiculous.

Ive managed maybe ten pieces today which is great but mostly I have enjoyed feeling creative again. Yes I didn’t feed the kids and absolutely I should have made them do something productive instead of leaving them to do whatever it is they got up to all day, but it was more important for me to do what I needed to do because I far less grumpy and dickish when I am being creative. I never received any notifications that I had been charged for anything so I think I got away lightly.

I think November will be better.

Up yours Alanis Morisette

In 1995 Alanis Morisette went on and on about things that aren’t ironic being very much so.

In 1995 Alanis Morisette went on and on about things that aren’t ironic being very much so. All that nonsense about rain on your wedding day and a free ride when you’ve already paid. That’s not ironic, it’s just poor weather – something she could quite well have foreseen by checking a weather forecast and bad timing. I actually don’t think the woman has a clue what irony actually is.

I will tell you what irony is though shall I. Irony is when you write a post about backing up and then install a WordPress widget as part of the process and that widget causes a major issue with your WordPress site which in due course necessitates the use of that back up to fix the issues the back up process caused.

It even caused my blog to lose the ability to have people follow it which the WordPress folk explained was should have been expected when installing a widget or downloading a non WordPress theme on my plan and they also very kindly acknowledged that yes, they probably ought to point this out. Good of them I thought.

5 days later, a reset of my site to the 9th of April and an ongoing hassle with trying to get things back to normal and hopefully I will soon be able to get back to some writing again. Lessons learned I guess…Not really sure what they are yet though maybe Alanis has a song about it.

What do you see?

A moment of your time please…

I seem to be having a few problems with WordPress at the moment. Just yesterday I was told that I no longer had a follow button on my website because I had chosen to add a widget. What sort of world is it where you would have a Blog but not have the option for somebody to follow it? Honest. Today though I’m just wondering whether you would mind leaving me a comment if you read this post as to what you saw when you were trying to get to it. Is it like everybody elses blog where you see a link in the reader and you click on it and you’re taken to the piece that I have written? Or, more annoyingly, do you see a link similar to the one in the header and below which asks you to follow a link to view the post.

A seemingly unnecessary second click to get to the peace that I have written. If you wouldn’t mind just letting me know what you saw and maybe whether you were in the reader or finding my post another way say perhaps through an email . It would be most appreciated because the WordPress happiness engineers seem to be really struggling to help me with this.

Thanks!

I Just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone that has clicked, read, liked and followed me since I turned up on here just a couple of weeks ago.

I had no idea what I was going to write when I started, knowing only that I wanted to put pen to paper. I thought perhaps I needed a message or a theme but I have simply just enjoyed writing whatever takes my fancy.

I won’t labour the point, but again just thanks for popping by and helping make this a hugely rewarding experience.

I took a 30 year break – Dormant – Daily Prompt

That Christmas I asked for a typewriter, thinking that I had found my calling, and I bashed out a few teen angst inspired poems about solitude and rainy days …

I have always wanted to write. Or I thought I did. When I was 17 I scribbled a story in a large black book my dad stole from work one summer. I don’t remember what it was about, but I do know that Victor Visser borrowed it to read and never gave it back!

That Christmas I asked for a typewriter, thinking that I had found my calling, and I bashed out a few teen angst inspired poems about solitude and rainy days before succumbing to rage and frustration and a realisation that the I could not type and would be spending all of my time correcting what I had bashed out.

I did very little after that with the exception of a Tolkien inspired epic poem which I worked on when I was in the Army just after I left school. I have no idea what happened to it but I still remember the opening even after 28 years:

“The swirling veils of morning mist

were swept aside as morning kissed

the sleeping lands that lay below

and waking winds began to blow.”

I think the rest was about a quest and an evil force and a ring and some wizards and…well you get the idea. Mostly thievery.

And that, as far as I recall was it. For a short while I thought Journalism was for me but I never did anything about it, I mostly just had an itch which I left unscratched.

Fast forward three decades, a wife, 2 kids, mortgage, career and a load of stuff in between I found myself inspired by a friend to look at WordPress just over a fortnight ago. Well, I will be honest, it has been rather fun and wholly addictive and after nearly 30 years I have managed to write some of the things I always wanted to but didn’t know I did.

I have no idea how one should write, I do not know whether full stops go before speech marks and the structure of a good story is beyond me. I do know though that I am loving doing it, even if it is a shambles.

Perhaps it was how easy it was to set up, maybe the joy of writing, perhaps it was the thrill of someone actually liking something I wrote or maybe just the joy of finishing something I meant to do so long ago but never got round to.

Whatever it is, my wife hopes I put that shelf up in the kitchen sooner than it took me to do this because I also assured her, in a very similar way, that ensuring she has somewhere to put the pans is something I want to do very much, if only I could find my spirit level.

Want to read more of my stuff that’s not about me but about Aliens and zombies and people and rude poems and life and stuff?

https://afterwards.blog/2017/07/14/probing-a-cautionary-tale/

https://afterwards.blog/2017/07/03/first-blog-post/

https://afterwards.blog/2017/07/14/we-unlikely-few/

Https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/Dormant/