Blogging is Hard

If anyone ever tells you that writing is easy you should punch them in the face. Hard. If anyone ever tells you this they are either: a) lying; b) wrong, or; c) an idiot. Alternatively they could be one of those few, truly gifted individuals for whom words simply flow out of their minds and their hands like high pressure geysers of idea flavoured water. If that is the case you should still punch them, if only to make yourself feel better. People can harp on about how the struggle to write is a character building journey which makes the end result all the more rewarding. You should punch them too, because no amount of empty platitudes are going to detract from the fact that you and not them, still have to slog your way through to the end. It’s like telling a soldier not to worry, they’re fighting for freedom and democracy and justice and that in the end, it’ll all be worth it, to which the soldier in question is more than entitled to respond with “Well that’s nice and all, but I’ve just had both of my fucking legs blown off! You are not helping! Don’t just stand there! Help me stop the bleeding!”

My own personal foray into the world of writing really began with the inception of this crass and tawdry corner of the internet; my first tentative steps into the blogosphere. That was five hundred and ninety-nine days ago. This is blog post number ninety-nine and I will tell you now, it’s not gotten any easier and I still have no fucking idea what I’m doing.

Perhaps I shot myself in the foot by deciding “Oh yes, I will update every week. This will be super easy! I am are beings super writer, yes?” I swear, sometimes I am my own worst enemy. The problem with updating weekly is finding things to say, a problem exacerbated by the fact that my daily routine largely consists of coming home from work and then sitting in the dark, in front of a computer, murdering a series of belligerent polygons and angry pixels. An uneventful life does not lend itself to great blog fodder. Not that my previously buzzing social calendar of “going round to my mates house and rolling a collection of polyhedral dice” offered much in the way inspiration. And yet some how I soldier on, eking out something resembling writing, tentatively associated to a theme, all in a frantic panic on a Sunday evening. Which is what has ultimately led to me blogging about blogging, something which is far too meta for my own personal tastes, but when you’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel clean you’ve got little choice but to start taking great, big, dirty chunks out of the barrel itself.

Perhaps what makes writing so hard, is the fact that so much of it is all a sham, an elaborately constructed lie. Writers desperately trying to hide to fact that they’re being eaten away from the inside by their own doubt and self-loading, or their inability to overcome the variety of linguistic spanners that keep getting thrown into the cogs of their brains. After a while, keeping up the illusion that you find writing easier than you actually do, the appearance that you’re not wading waist-deep through a sea of treacly shit, probably becomes increasingly harder to maintain.

An Irishman once told me that no one in the blogosphere actually has anything interesting to say, no one seems to have noticed that neither do I. But irrespective of the truth of that statement, or the difficulties involved, I’ll keep writing and keep blogging. Why? Because having come this far it seems pretty fucking stupid to stop now.