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Inertia

At the risk of harping on old themes, the writing has fallen by the wayside a bit in recent times, after a couple of years where I felt I was vaguely on top of things, and able to carve out a routine whereby I could make time to write, this year threw everything up in the air again.

As is nearly always the case, there isn't any one particular cause, a variety of calls on one's time make the process of sitting down to put something down in writing harder, and before you know it, it's been so long that you almost can't imagine starting again. It certainly doesn't help things that this year has taken a turn for the seriously dark, and I'm not sure the world needs my opinions on things we all know to be awful.

(Though I would observe that it makes a cruel mockery of all those people posting cheery facebook statuses at the end of the last couple of years about hooray that year's over, things can't get any worse! Stop it. Just stop it. You're all the equivalent of the criminal going straight who gets tempted into one last job, stop making yourselves hostages to fortune. Basically, I'm saying that it's all your fault)

Indeed, I've been slowly coming round to the view that the world needs a whole lot less opinion, so I'm increasingly reluctant to add to it. And yet here I am. Quite the Catch-22, isn't it? 

The thing is simply that writing is a habit that I struggle to break. I realised with a jolt the other day that it's been three years since my last little chapbook came out, three years in which I have written little of note (quite a lot of diarising, mostly), but have kept plugging away anyway. Why? Because I can't imagine not doing it. 

Weeks will go by where I don't, of course, but that little itch will always be there, lodged in the hindbrain, and suddenly I find myself typing this.

And so here we have this curious, rambling (though short, it takes real lack of skill to be so unfocused in such a small space, I reckon) blog post, caught as it is between several stools. The inspiration has deserted me, but the desire hasn't, so here I'll stay for a bit, banging my head intermittently against the brick wall of my own inertia, wondering whether or not, this time, a brick might dislodge.

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