Happy Blog-aversary to me! One year ago I fired up this bad boy and 265 posts later I’m still here! I had a few false starts. It took me until mid-May last year to work out exactly what it was that I was blogging about. You might be wondering exactly what it is that I do blog about…thank you for asking. My blog is called WriterPainter – Words about Art and Life. I write about whatever has popped into my head that particular day, but always about art and life and how we use art in its many forms to create meaning in our lives.
The first few weeks (months) of this blog were really scratchy. I am still finding my voice. I’m not rushing anything. I’m in a good place with it and I am very lucky as I don’t have any pressure to perform creatively (i.e. earn money) because the Day Job keeps the roof over my head. It has been a fantastic way of ensuring that I write daily, or almost daily. I try to have the weekend off unless something jumps up and demands that I write about it.
I love when friends tell me that they enjoy my blog. Sometimes blogging can feel like you’re shouting into the wind so it is LOVELY beyong measure when someone tells me they like reading my waffle. Even more lovely when they tell me that it helped in some way. This is what keeps me writing, oh and the fact that if I don’t write I will go potty. (Go?…)
Nothing worthwhile comes without effort.
Jordan Peterson ~ On the podcast with Sir Roger Scruton
My creative writing is a whole other bag of cats right now. I have been giving my mind too little down-time. I seem to constantly have my head-phones in, listening obsessively to podcasts! I need to know everything…NOW! But this week I’ve had a little break from listening and lo and behold, some story fragments washed up on the shore!
Here’s a little snippet of an idea for the second draft of Mimi Gets Away with Murder. {The story is set in the USA in 2030. California should have seceded when they could. I’m not a fan of prologues but I feel this could be something of a prologue to introduce the setting. I see it as a letter to a British character in the UK when the “walls” went up.} it’s a bit of a mess but hey it’s written 🤨
as you’d imagine, life was hard after the walls went up. Most of us can remember where we were when we heard what was happening. I was at the shop, meeting with the staff, we were scared but now I know we were naive about what was to come. Those of us who are a little older, who still read, can recall the other day, the day it all really started to go to shit.
People thought things were bad with the 45th President but some of the later ones made him look like a choir boy. It was the 48th, the last one, that really…well, they really lit the fuse when they… there’s no other word for it; they decriminalised murder. I’ve been writing to you for so many years, trying to convince you (and myself) that despite what you think of us, on the other side of the pond; that we’re savages, that money is everything and life is cheap…
that you’d be right.
Sorry I got a little maudlin there. Back to the facts. The Artificial Intelligence the world had been pumping out for decades had been running all kinds of low-level petty functionary roles and it just made…sense. It was just the next logical step to everyone in charge and by then those who weren’t in charge could do nothing about it. Of course that was only the beginning of the end.
There were those who found themselves at the top of the food chain couldn’t believe their luck. The rich got richer and the poor got out, if they could. For anyone ignorant or…cruel enough… it seemed like a good thing but even for them, things aren’t so good now.
Who would have thought decriminalising murder would come back to bite us on the ass.