I’m feeling deeply nostalgic at the moment and also cannot sleep, so I thought I’d open up this notepad in WordPress and start typing. It has been forever and I feel like both my life and the internet has changed monumentally since the last time I blogged regularly. But who cares? This is still my little corner of the internet that (almost) no one reads and if I want to type into it then no one will stop me.
You see, a series of coincidental events led me to rewatch my All the Tors video for the BMC tonight. The one that I submitted to the BMC Women in Adventure Film competition way back in 2021 (?). Well, I only watched most of it. I stopped before the sad part. But I was completely surprised at how not awful it was to watch. Which I guess shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, given that it was shortlisted for the prize and has over 10,000 views.
But all I remembered about it was what was wrong. I was so deep in the editing that my memory of it was that I should have zoomed in more on the photo album, the music/voice balance was probably a bit off and the cuts could have been cleaner. But damn girl, that was your first ever film ever. You had never made anything like it before and it’s really not half bad. Especially as a first shot.
The same thing happened when I picked up a print copy of Intrepid Magazine, that I still have a few of and probably ought to have thrown out or given away by now. In my head I think of those early issues predominantly as an embarrassment. That the font size wasn’t right, the layout not quite right, the – well, I’ve blacked out the feeling of panic that I was constantly on a treadmill of commissioning and editing. But the issue I flipped through was really not awful. It wasn’t super professional or luxury or anything, but it was pretty good actually.
And it’s got me thinking two things. One that I really ought to do better to try to remember the good parts of what I’m creating. That if something still had flaws, it might also be 80% of the way there. And that 80% shouldn’t be simply dismissed because I’m staring at the ugly 20%.
Secondly that I really miss creating something because I want to create it, not because I feel like I should. More – that I can create things on a whim, without a plan or an announcement. Without a follow up or a reason. And in practice that’s usually because I am utterly swamped under a sea of to-do list items in my daily life. Everything is competing for priority and I’m not always clear on how I se those priorities for myself.
But heck, when did I stop thinking about the internet as a place where I could just randomly post stuff that no one would care about? Perhaps it was when it started to be partly tied up with my job. Perhaps when what I posted on line had some, if indirect, link to how people who might actually enter real life percieved me. Whether that’s offers of work or people I might meet at an event or… I don’t know, people. People who might speak to me one day.
In the same way that, although I never posted much on social media ever anyway, the part of social media I see isn’t very social any more at all. It’s much more performative, or frankly engineered to be ‘engaging’ without necessarily illiciting actual social connection. If that makes sense.
And I don’t know if anyone even knows how to find blogs anymore. I kind of left Twitter when I was freelancing my face off, trying to make it as an adventure travel jounralist (spoiler alert: I didn’t) and I’m pretty sure that was how anyone new found my blog to start with. Other than Google search which, sadly, is really not great at giving me what I’m searching for anymore (perhaps you feel this too?). It spends more time guessing at what I want to know than giving me what I asked for.
But anyway, it’s literally 4 minutes to midnight now and I have a shift tomorrow and so many other things I need to do before and after that. But I guess I’ve been watching enough vlogs – of entrepreneurs and mountaineers alike – to make me think, heck, why not just type stuff into the internet again and see what happens.
Because I really do miss this. I miss feeling like I am building up, crafting, shaping something. Blogging to me is the online version of gardening. Tending something and seeing how it grows. And although it’s easy to say to myself at midnight on a Saturday, I want to do more of this. I miss writing with low stakes and a small audience. But an audience none the less.
There are so many trips I haven’t written about on here over the past few years – two Morocco expeds and my JMT American extravaganza to name a fews – probably because I’ve been too busy trying to use them to earn a living. Both Morocco ones were research for a Cicerone guidebook which is now in print. (Not that there’s anyone here but please don’t rush out to buy it. I only get £1.80 per sale.) And I am making good headway on the America book (daare I say it, I might have it finished by the end of the year!). But most of what I’ve published since 2021 has been in print (serious), in magazines or online newspapers (serious) or essentially ghost/copywriting as part of someone else’s project where text was needed (serious/work). Top that off with a large portion of my freelance work being editing or proofreading, there is no time for me to let my hair down in text. To ramble on, or create because I want to.
So who knows, maybe this is my chance to bring back blogging. I don’t know really. Like I said, it’s all very well saying these things late at night when the world is silent. But I’ll probably be regetting this moment tomorrow, because I could have been sleeping.
But ah well hey? Here I am and maybe next time I’ll have something to say about what I want to create. Maybe next time I’ll tell you about all the ideas I have and make some text-only version of Grace Andrews’ vlogs. But probably not. Probably it’ll just be me tapping away into the internet. I dunno.
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