I am one year old!

That’s right. It’s now one year on from the first entry on the Macmillan New Writer blog, as featured on the now defunct “WritingBlock” site. A blog entry that read like this:

“December 2005: Reasons
As merry ol' England, Scotland and Wales is in the grip of a winter freeze (but let's not kid ourselves here, this isn't exactly a catastrophic weather event, is it? I reckon our coping skills aren't what they used to be) I woke this morning thinking, why am I writing a blog? Is it arrogance to think someone might actually want to read it, or is it something else? I think it's a little bit of both. I've never kept a diary, never had something hidden in the top draw under a pile of socks or utility bills, with my deepest thoughts, or not so deepest thoughts scrawled inside. I've never had the patience for one, nor the time for another. But this is different. Never before have I been in a position that could be potentially life-changing. For me this is the last big chance of getting somewhere with my writing before the responsibility of a family comes my way, and all the baggage and loss of time that comes with it. So 2006 is the year that makes or breaks me (oh, that and also 2007 - afterall that’s when the book comes out). So really this blog is for me. To remind me of what has happened over the next 12 months, the ups and downs, and the middles. If anyone else reads this and thinks, "mmm, interesting", that's a bonus. So in the spirit of post-Christmas dieting, please bare with me if it turns into waffle and if it does, I’ll promise to make it low fat…”


Has anything changed since then? Plenty. Apart from being closer to seeing my book on the shelves of the local bookshop, I feel wiser – especially from writing a blog for a year. On blogs like these you bear your soul at least partly, and open yourself to criticism. Thankfully, the criticism I’ve taken is of the constructive kind. It’s also opened doors to people I would have never been in contact with before; it’s made the writing life more colourful, and that’s a big fat bonus that any blogger should be grateful for…

Blogs are an odd thing. They can be utterly pointless to all except the writer. Or they can give others a glimpse of something “interesting”. They can be a great promotional tool (who out there would have heard of The Secret War if it weren’t for this blog?) or an utter waste of a writer’s time (I’ve written around 50,000 words on this blog so far – the length of a short book…).
I suppose it’s a communal thing, and a comfort thing, and a place to shout something you believe is credible into cyberspace, hoping that someone might hear it.

Whether this blog has the longevity to last another 12 months, I don’t really know. Next year will be a busy time, not least with the new book. Those 50,000 words could be handy when writing it, and while blogging is a welcome distraction, it is still a distraction and there is an issue over the worth of blogs. If you ask any writer what they would rather have, a fairly popular blog or a published novel, I think most would chose the latter.
I suppose it’s also about juggling. And over the past months, I’ve become good at it, only dropping the occasional project.

But next year, there will be less margin for error.
Next year the whole writing thing becomes more serious, and like a lot of bloggers - 200 million if you read the article on the BBC, – I may have to halt the whole blogging thing indefinitely.


But we’ll wait and see… Nothing is certain these days, be it a good second novel, Australia winning the Ashes, not even ITV showing a James Bond film on Christmas day! ;-)



Merry Christmas to you all!

Matt
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