This wayward blog: why I need to change my MO

This blog was originally intended to serve several aims. First and foremost it was initiated as a log of what was going on in our lives so that anybody who was interested in what we were doing could just check here. It was meant to save me time that otherwise would have been spent writing the same thing several times to several individuals about what we were doing. So the main purpose of this blog was to serve as the answer to the question, "What have you been up to lately?". Well, at first glance it seems to have done that but I now feel that the scope of the enterprise has become quite narrow in a way. The only events that get recorded here these days are travel events of which I managed to take photos. While the posts I construct for the blog are entertaining enough for anyone else, their format has become pretty predictable and restricted in some ways. These days a post begins when I have photos of an event and I write a frame of exposition around them; it no longer begins when I feel that I want to write something or that I think that I have something to write about. And this is where my blog has slowly and subtly left the main line and headed off down a lesser track to destinations predictable. The important point here is that my other big reason for having a blog in the first place was to serve as an outlet for my literary passions and this has been lost in the honing of this blog's MO: this blog started out as a life narrative with a lot of scope for practicing the craft of writing and has somehow shrunk to a photo-travel-narrative.

Everything I write in this blog these days is considered and thoughtful and polished because of the writer's equivalent of performance anxiety. In as much, it is rather formal and doesn't allow me to stretch much or experiment or simply practice writing in whatever form and way I want. I have only just realised that what I need to do is to begin another blog for personal expression and continue Sesquipedaustralian as a record of our time and travels. However, I want to broaden the scope of this blog to include a bit more of daily life and I also want to be able to post without having photos to anchor the trials and tribulations concerned; for example, if we experience a mini-trauma getting plane tickets and I want to write about the experience, then I am not going to have photos to illustrate what I am talking about; yet an experience like that might well be worth writing about and feature as a memorable experience, something we want to remember for better or worse.

So, outcomes...? I will begin another blog purely for personal expression where I can smear the joy of writing all over myself in an orgy of syntactical and grammatical perversion. And I will continue to post here on Sesquipedaustralian but broaden the scope of the content to include our experience of life in general. To be honest I didn't know what I was going to do or say when I started writing this post and I hadn't even thought of starting another blog. I think this post serves as a demonstration of therapy through writing. And I am happy at the prospect of being able to write about nothing in particular (in another place). Sometimes the best thing to do when you don't know what to write about is just to start writing: begin the process by writing anything at all and let your thoughts order themselves in the process. I guess it's a lot like meditation in that way.