Blogging Failure Alert

I haven’t really posted much in a while, and, it’s kind of deliberate, not because I’ve got nothing to say – anyone who spends more than a few minutes with me will know I’ve got a lot to say, especially when it comes to blogging.. But, I feel – speechless.

Obviously that’s going to go right out of the window now, because well, I’m writing but this is more a collection of thoughts than coherent writing but events over the past few weeks have irked me and I’m trying to piece it together. So – hold tight!

There was a massive change in me when the Paris attacks happened. It was heart wrenching watching everything unfold that evening, all those poor people who were just doing ‘stuff’ on a Friday night  like most people my age, popping out to dinner or seeing a band play, then – gone. It wasn’t some weird named place in the third world, it’s a city I can get to by train, a few hours away. It was chilling, and has probably moved me more than I care to admit. In-between the swathes of reports from Paris, I saw the same bloggers, pushing out the same auto tweets they have, endlessly for the last days, weeks, months and years – the never-ending output of bile and fluff.

No – your ‘Top 5 Photography Tips’ isn’t important now. No – I have no interest in your ‘Mental Breakdown’, or your post about ‘Knowing your Worth’ – people were getting torn apart in a sea of bullets, and all I could see in the swathes of Twitter was irrelevant fluff.I was hoping it would stop, no – it just continued, as the news got worse, the fluff piled in. No one thought to switch off the crap, perhaps they were asleep, or too self absorbed to notice, but I did what I could, I unfollowed. I find unfollwing someone hard, especially if I know them, have met them, and generally like them – but equally they can’t be that great a person if they can’t even suss out Twitter.

Twitter is immediate – it’s now – it’s not what you *think* people might want to read next week, or even sometimes tomorrow, a lot can happen in a few hours, and the world can change so quickly.

There isn’t room for a ‘scheduled tweet’ in a world that changes so rapidly.

I’ve had so much to write up, and post on here but just thinking about everything that’s gone on, it just feels ridiculous – I started out this place for me, as a little diary of my life, and whilst it’s fallen aside at times, that’s been the general idea. I write the words that are in my head, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t but I’ve put them out there for people to see. I don’t see blogging as a job – it’s just something I do when I have the time or inclination to muster the words.

I feel passionate about blogging – not because of the freebies and press trips, I genuinely think that good can come of this, whether it’s making friends, or finding someone going through the same shit you’re dealing with. Feeling isolated and alone, is the worst feeling you can have, but finding someone who’s been there, or currently right where you will always help, but, so much stuff out there at the moment is just – crap.

So much self promotion, no self-deprecation, just endless swathes about boosting your views, gift guides, Top Tens, Top Fives, Top Threes, smugness, reveal videos, hauls, endless competitions…

Stop.

Go back to the start.

Go back to the point where you wrote words and hoped that someone would read, rather than KNOW they will.

I had a slight epiphany as found myself sat in a pub with Jem and Alex – these were two folks I’d ‘met’ through blogging. Jem who probably comments the most on this blog, who I was super excited to meet, and Alex who I’d met lots before, and is probably one of the two or three Dad bloggers that I like. These two are lovely, stand out people, who just blog and get on with it, they don’t see themselves as superstars of the blogging world, or charge hundreds of quid to rock up at an event. They are just decent, hard-working folk, who blog for the love of it, and are incredibly nice people at the heart of it – we sat wittering away for ages like the best of friends, and despite not having had all that much time together ‘in person’ – you already have a good measure from the words they write and their honest online persona’s.

They aren’t characters, or caricatures, they are pretty fucking awesome people.

Blogging needs more of this, decent people, no airs, graces or self promotion – just good people.