WRITING AND BLOGGING

In my early morning blogsurfing I came across writer William Gibson’s blog and his reason for temporarily abandoning it:

“I’ve found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I’ve most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m definitely not writing a novel – that is, if I’m still blogging, I’m definitely still on vacation. I’ve always known, somehow, that it would get in the way of writing fiction, and that I wouldn’t want to be trying to do both at once. The image that comes most readily to mind is that of a kettle failing to boil because the lid’s been left off.” (Continue reading)
As one who is fairly new to blogging, I am just becoming aware of the time I spend on it. Blogging serves many purposes to a writer; it offers a deadline, it is a holder of ideas, it is an easier transition into the discipline of writing, it is a more positive option than stagnation to temporary downtime, it is connection with others of like interests, and it can be all of one’s writing efforts in itself. But just as I’ve learned to rearrange “folding laundry”—which is becoming a euphemism for anything other than blogging or other priority in life, I can ration my blogging time by limiting my searches for new logs, restricting reading of my favorite links to once or twice daily checking, and reverting to my old habit of writing in Word and transferring once or twice a day into Spinning (which just proved to be a good idea since the server cut out while I was typing this first directly into my posting page). Time is there for everything if we learn to use it wisely.