Couldn't resist, sorry!
I’ve had a blog (Blogger, Wordpress or Squarespace) for almost twenty years, since 2005.
And then I fell out of the blogging habit in 2018, and never got it back. This website is the only blog-space which is left, and it’s had some severe pruning recently. Old posts have been culled, and even what’s left seems not to fit any more. It’s a shame in some ways because writing a blog three or four times a week for more than ten years was good exercise for my writing muscles and equipped me well for the leap from 200 words to the 96,000 in The Sewing Machine.
This week I completely deleted my Twitter account.
My newsletters have come and gone, from a basic segmented email list in the beginning, to Mailchimp, to Tinyletter, to Substack.
Some people use Instagram as a sort of micro blog, and others use LinkedIn as a social network. TikTok is in the mix now as well. But we cannot be everywhere, and anyway, who would want that?
So I’ve been thinking about where I want to spend my time. In the past I would have approached this as identifying how best to stay in touch with customers or readers, but I find myself thinking now about which spaces I enjoy most as a writer, or as a very amateur taker of photographs.
It seems to me that a blog on a website can be a welcoming space which is open to everyone. You don’t need an app or an account or a password or even a smartphone. I have recently dipped my toe in the Substack pool and I quite like it there too, so I’m thinking I will write in both places for now, and see how I feel in a few months time. Some things may be duplicated, some not.
A big part of blogging has always been the sense of community, and that’s a rather wonderful and yet ephemeral thing which seems to grow by accident, and it seems that Substack is set up for that community-feel.
But mostly this is about having some fun, and enjoying writing words again without thinking about building them into a book.
I have just spent a weekend at New Lanark in the company of some great women. We sewed and quilted and ate home made cake and I drank more decaffeinated coffee in a weekend than I’ve had in the last five years. I finished one quilt top, and with some expert assistance I learned how to layer it using 505 spray instead of pins. And then I launched into piecing another top which is destined for my living room wall. Pictures next time.
Natalie
PS. My Substack is called Natterings. It had to be, didn’t it?,
if you’d like to subscribe, you’ll find it here.
