And I'll Be Back

I’m sorry about not updating like a Mad-Hatter that I used to be. Nia wrote a post and it made me all guilty about the kind of crap I have been churning out for my blog these days. Most of it, just for the heck of it. I see the quality of my writing taking a serious hit; The Bike Ride and Real Beauty were so much better than Of Simple Lives and Raindrops and I’m sure you’d more than agree with me.

There was a time when I used to write for myself. A time when each piece I wrote took me an hour and a half, intense involvement and thoroughly furrowed eyebrows to conjure up. A time when each word I wrote made me happy, made me feel the emotion. A time when I finished typing and I’d be overcome with a feeling of intense satisfaction, one of having done something useful. A time when I used to be proud of having written that piece, so much so that I run around asking people to read it (regardless of whether they wanted to or not). Writing good stories and pieces get me high like nothing else does.

Somewhere along the way, I started posting to accommodate the growing number of followers; I started to think in terms of what they’ll want to read rather than what I’d want to write about. I started being increasingly random, I cooked up fiction that I did not feel just so that I’d keep up the posting frequency; each post giving me increasing amount of inferiority complexes about the poor quality of my own writing. I consoled myself saying that if people don’t criticize the posts, then it doesn’t matter. I refused to acknowledge that criticism is not a part of the blogger world; we just do not say it out loud.

I started using my blog to get back at people person/s, I know I should have drawn the line then but the stupid part of me egged the sensible part on. I took up a brainless meme, which I hate seeing in my archives now.

The trick is to find that fine line between what I feel and what readers want to read. I realize now, that I’ll be proud of my blog only when I love every single post. And while posting frequency matters, quality matters even more. To me, atleast.

What was once a source of immense pleasure and inspiration, has become a chore; reading blogs, ones that I love and ones that I discover. I have hated leaving comments in the last few days for I left them just for the heck of it. I haven’t even been able to do full justice to DOV. The writer in me wilts at all these.  

I’ve decided to take a break for a week (I doubt if I’ll be able to keep away even that long and I have to block myself on Google to stop me from posting anything) but I have to do this if I want to be proud of what I write once again, something that means a lot to me in the long run. I think of this as a cleansing process of sorts, kinda like getting my head out of the dung it seems to be stuck in and airing it out a little bit.

Do NOT get me wrong, I still am as obsessed with Blogger and the writer in me still breathes for those lovely comments and mails that I get but I just need to find a way to go back to what I was when I came to Blogger first.

My not-so-new maxim

Do wait around for I’ll be back with better PeeVeeness.

P.S: No blogging crisis here. No depression. Just thoughts of having gotten stuck in a place I don’t want to be in.

P.P.S: I just wrote out a whole post bitching about somebody who has made it their sole aim to annoy the crap out of my life, the shame at the vitriol and sheer violence of the post made these realizations surface. At least Annoyer was helpful that way. And special thanks to Spiff, who has somehow become that person I go to when I'm extremely frustrated.

P.P.S.S: After more than three years, I still love my post scripts:) At least some things haven’t changed.

P.P.P.S.S: Prithvi, Shreya and Viya, you guys are the mantals :P I was reading through my Twitter timeline only to realize that we make absolutely NO SENSE:D

P.P.P.S.S.S: Does anybody else think that a grown up, seemingly non-retarded person who spells pretty as ‘pwetty’ should be shot? At least in the ankle? No? Sad.