Writersblock

After being stymied for months with the self-induced pressure to write a “where I’ve been” post — the very short answer is: New York for a year and now back — I discovered that the nice folks at WordPress put out daily writing prompts as well as weekly photo challenges and writing challenges. Though I’m not certain I could keep up with the daily version, I clicked there first to see what it was all about. The topic served its purpose: here I am again.

Writer’s Block Party

When was the last time you experienced writer’s block? What do you think brought it about — and how did you dig your way out of it?

On some level the question has already been answered. But my take on the prompt is a bit different. Here’s my real answer:

The last time I experienced writersblock was about ten years ago. It was the name of my first blog, which existed on the uJournal platform. I’d started it after returning from Japan, as a way of sharing life with friends back there — and all over the place — while avoiding the dreaded mass email. I’d been blogging there for about two years, through my stint in Vietnam, before their server(s) crashed and all my posts got zapped.

It took a while for me to regain any faith in blogging, but at the end of the day I was still taken by the idea of writing, adding pictures, and not just sharing it all but also interacting with friends through the comments. (That never really panned out, though: much of my community doesn’t want “to put it all out there,” and the few friends I convinced to start a blog were soon defeated by how much work it is to actually post regularly.) I started up again with LiveJournal, which had rescued the uJournal servers and allowed me to recover my posts. I loved the added depth of the “feeling __” and “listening to __” fields, as well as the comment threading and custom color options, of LiveJournal — these were the very early days of blogging ! — though I didn’t like that only registered members could comment on posts. So I dabbled with other blogging platforms — Xanga; Blogger, for a long time; and finally WordPress — as well as various blog names. By that time, writersblock was no longer available, so I blogged life at jeaneology and knitting and books at knitterature. As blog technology advanced to include categories, tags, pages, and more, I ended up back here at jeaneology.

Recently I went back through all my blogs and copied all my posts to save offline. It was neat and nostaltic and –not gonna lie — at times cringe-inducing to relive the past twelve years. Overall it was a memorable exercise. So now I’m back. And it feels pretty good.