Anyone who’s ever owned a Windows computer will have played around with the little free games that come with it. I could never get to grips with minesweeper but I played a lot of solitaire and ended up getting really good at it. It got to a point where if I was sat at my computer at any moment of absent-mindedness I’d instinctively start up a solitaire game and start shifting cards around with haste. I wasn’t enjoying it, or even playing, it had become a reflex and a pursuit of improving on my prior top score, probably what it’s like playing video games in Korea. Exam season at university broke that cycle, finally, with final essays and revision taking much higher priority, and these days I’ll play a game every now and then but I’ve all but lost interest. Recently, however, with the spare time I’ve had on my hands, I’ve taken to playing solitaire with real cards on a table to pass the time.
Whilst it’s not an addiction, writing for my other blog, Bluepig, has become a big element of my life. Some people spend their entire lives trying to get the pink elephant off their backs; I’m usually trying to find ways to keep the blue pig on mine. At times it feels as though there’s nothing more difficult that keeping a blog running with a good dose of regularity, taking the things you see and do day-to-day, converting it into interesting prose, and doing this often enough that you can post something once a week – every Friday on Bluepig. Never been easy but two years down the line I’ve never seriously thought about just giving it up and closing the blog down for good. It’s like keeping a journal; if you do it long enough you don’t have to force yourself to write in it, the journal will make you write instead.
Bluepig’s diversified a little recently, and I think it’s done the blog a lot of good. One post I’ve been considering writing in this pattern of variation is a post about just that – how I make my posts. I decided to make it on here instead though, I haven’t posted on here since I left Plattsburgh and it seems right to write about it on here rather than the blog in question. So as I shuffle my deck and lay out another solitaire game, let’s take a look at the process of writing up a post for the Bluepig.
Though in recent times I’ve become a devoted convert to the school of solid pre-planning and note-taking, drafting and editing, when writing for Bluepig I don’t tend to do much of these things. The main focus of the blog is the photography and the writing is supplementary; it’s more often than not about filling in the gaps. If I’m out getting pictures for a post, though, I’ll often bullet point a basic structure for a post in a little notebook if I stop off somewhere for coffee. In the past I’ve used whatever cheap notepads I can get my hands on but in the last 4 months I’ve gathered a bunch of these miniature composition books, which are really cheap and have pages that tear out easily, so I’ve stuck with them. If I’m writing a larger post, such as the two-parters I did in Ottawa and Quebec City, I’ll make a checklist of things I want to get pictures of in my notebook.
Originally, when I’d write a post I’d write it straight into BlogSpot, but now I use a word processor instead. It serves a double purpose; I find it easier to review and compose when writing on a word processor, and it also means I can save copies of my writing to my hard drive, so that if anything ever happened to my blog or BlogSpot as a whole I’ll always have my work. Whether people read my work or not, I’d like to keep a hold of it.
The camera that does all of the work. It’s a Kodak EasyShare C9, nothing fancy but it does the job and the battery life is pretty good. A nicer camera may produce better quality pictures but for these small, user-friendly cameras this one works great (there’s not much difference between them all really), and an SLR would be too unwieldy because all of my photos have to be taken one-handed, the other holding the pig of course. Sometimes it gives me grief with its auto-focus but I’ve never gone somewhere and not been able to get the pictures I’ve wanted. Before I got this camera I used my camera-phone instead (a Sony-Ericcson something or other, I don’t have it to hand), which really did produce lesser quality pictures but it also produced some really great shots, too.
And finally, the subject of all the attention, the pig himself. He’s about 3 inches long and an inch and a half tall, not big at all which makes him portable enough to take him to the places I want to and get the shots needed for the blog. He’s actually a stress toy, though I’m very protective of people actually squeezing him for fear of his head coming off or something like that. I was given him by my auntie for reasons unknown to me; he’s a promotional stress toy for ‘NiQuitin CQ’ a company that sell nicotine patches. I don’t smoke and I never have, so I’ve no idea why it ended up with me, but I’m not complaining. When a friend asked if I’d take a photograph of them away with me and take pictures of said photo in famous places I realised that I could instead take the pig, and make a blog out of it, which is how it all began. I wrote some entry posts to have a little of a foundation before telling people about the blog, then started writing seriously in my build-up to going to summer camp in 2009, the first real post of travel being my trip to London to get my visa for camp. That was all the way back in May 2009, and now, 2 years down the line, I’m still going, and writing more than ever.
