The end

In fiction, I think I’m not too bad at endings, but in real life I’m not so good at them. I tend to use up my emotions prematurely, or else push on long past when I should have stopped. I never got my finishing end with Plup – there were too many small endings, and eventually I became stupid with them, announcing loudly my last ever spilling of coffee and my last trip to the toilet. By the time I closed the door for the last time the shop no longer felt like the shop to me, with the bare walls and large empty windows and far too much space, and I didn’t feel much at all, although I tried hard to feel something.

I probably should have ended this blog back in February when I finished my series of seriously-written blog entries. I thought about it, and had half-intended to do so, but then I’d enjoyed writing them, and thought I’d found a way to write this blog that I liked, and that was good, and that I felt comfortable with. Still, it hasn’t quite worked out that way, and I seem to have slipped back into old habits with frivolous entries and irregular updates.

On reflection, I really see no reason why my life needs to be on the internet. It’s funny, I’ve done this blog for nearly four years now, but never much questioned why I do it. I suppose in retrospect there were a few reasons – it was a reaching-out to people, and provided an ersatz surrogate for the diary I’d stopped keeping a short while before I started this, and it made me feel I was at least writing something. Things are different now. I’m working hard on my novel – it goes slowly, and I’m not entirely happy with it, but then it’s not meant to be easy. Recently I’ve started keeping a diary again. My life has come naturally to a juncture; I am keen, generally, to make changes; something has to give, and I think it has to be this blog.

This is something I have thought about for a long time now; it’s not a momentary whim of mood. For every good reason I have for continuing this thing, I have an equally good reason for stopping. It allows me to stay in touch with people, but at the same time, as I pointed out accusatively once before, and now note without rancour, I think it does provide people with a superficial feeling that they are in touch with me when they really are not, or only occasionally are. It does encourage me to write on a regular basis, but it also encourages me to be less vigilant about the quality of what I send into the world. In the end I am a self-concious person, not particularly inclined to public demonstration, and I find at least half the things I write on here I end up regretting. Although I am cautious of how much I reveal here, the accumulation of information I provide is something with which I am uncomfortable, and leaves me feeling overexposed. Still, the main reason is simply that I want to spend my writing time working on my novel, and now that I find myself seriously engaged with the process of writing it, time spent doing this blog feels like a waste.

For these reasons and others I have decided to discontinue this blog. The nature of this sort of blog announcement being what it is, it would be stupid of me to say unequivocably that I will never again want to write this blog, or some other, but I really think I’ve had enough. Thank you all for reading. Thank you for the comments, which always meant a lot, and sometimes meant much more than could possibly have been imagined by the commenter. A short reminder of what is obvious – just because I don’t have a blog, it doesn’t mean I have ceased to exist, and should anybody be curious, I can still be found quite easily at the other end of a telephone line or internet connection.

Thanks and goodbye.

posted by Nicholas @ 10:15 PM 13 comments