Well this didn’t go to plan

It’s been a while, huh. The best part of ten months in fact, all the bohemian wishes of grandeur as I chronicled my adventures abroad seemed to have faded away. There are two reasons for this: neglecting all of my writings and the routine of daily life. For whatever reasons my writing habits went into a lull in late August. It’s most evident in my journal (though you’re not going to get to see that) where, for example, I wrote around 30 pages of text in my little black moleskine between July and thanksgiving in November, then since thanksgiving until now I’ve written somewhere around 175 pages – from 6 pages a month to 35 pages a month. Similarly with my bluepig blog, where there’s a vast gap between July and November, where I started writing regularly again. The routine of day-to-day life takes the edge away from the freshness of experience a year at a foreign university; eventually it stops feeling foreign altogether, something that was probably sped up because I’ve spent time over here before. At least now I’ve dragged myself back out of that marsh and am writing regularly again.

Plattsburgh has been a very mixed experience, some true highs and some painful lows. At first I was going out to parties regularly with a gang of other exchange students, but the police in a small town like this really don’t have anything better to do than to harass the students in their houses, which soured the whole thing. Add to that the real bane of my alcohol-related life: light beer. I can’t get drunk on light beer, I can’t even get tipsy on the stuff, I could drink 10 and still be stone cold sober, and because I’m not too keen on spirits and that’s all American students drink, I was pretty much stuck. So I gave it up, no more alcohol in the US, no more house parties.

I went home in December for Christmas to see my family and friends. Had a complete nightmare in getting home – all flights to Heathrow were cancelled which meant I was stranded in Montreal for three days. British Airways put me up in a hotel, so it wasn’t too rough, but my flight had to be rearranged, leading to me flying to both Miami and Paris, where I had a 9 hour layover before I could finally fly to Manchester and go home. It was exhausting, and made me pretty sick for around two weeks once I got home.

My blogging has been pretty limited in the past. I love the bluepig blog, which is now 2 years old and still going strong (I’ve got a few ideas that may very well pop up over the coming months, depending on where I end up) but it’s not necessarily my writing. In my mind I see bluepig as a photography blog with some minor travel writing included, seldom in detail, though since I’ve changed from writing directly onto the blog as the words come to me to writing on Microsoft word and editing/redrafting before I publish I feel as though my work has gotten better. My work’s gotten more professional in my academic writing too; I guess I’m finally growing up as a writer. Then last night I came across this:

It’s something I needed to see. So often I’ve felt like I should give up this whole blogging stuff due to feelings of inadequacy, even though I’ve seen the mantra of ‘the only way you get good at writing is by reading and writing a lot’ sometimes you don’t believe it. It takes a lot of willpower to say ‘even though I don’t like the way I write right now, if I carry on I’ll get better’ but it’s true, and that’s what I’m going to try and do from now on.

For a while now I’ve been considering starting up a new blog; a more personal blog where I write about what I’ve been up to, just day-to-day life wherever I’m living at the time. Life’s an adventure after all, in theory there’ll be plenty to write about if only I look for it. So stick the two together, a need to write more often and wanting to start a new blog, why not start using this one again? I’m not going to start properly for a couple of weeks; I’m entering the last days of my semester here so I’ve got a bunch of things to deal with as it is, like my final exams, packing up and leaving, and sorting out a flight home too, but it’s my hope that this blog can become a weekly-posting thing, with writing in long-form, rather than the short snippets I do on bluepig. Here’s to hoping.