Back to the blog?

I've been thinking about resurrecting my old blog. This one, right here. I've considered it a few times over the years and usually I come to the conclusion, "No one will care! You need to make a new blog! Or use Instagram more! Set up another Squarespace website! Make more YouTube content! Is it time to try TikTok?"

This week I started reading through some old posts off the back of the Amanda Palmer/Neil Gaiman news. It shouldn't be news. Peoples' privacy should be respected. And yet it's become one of the things I check Twitter for updates on every day, then hate myself for. I remembered bringing up this issue in a blog post once, about going to see The Residents live and comparing their anonymity vs. Amanda Palmer's full disclosure approach to social media. I decided to go back and look at what I wrote and while what I found was pretty much just that, I felt conflicted about my not feeling like I should know all this private stuff vs. my interest in all the private stuff. At the same time I found a bunch of other references to Amanda Palmer gigs I'd been to, the time Neil Gaiman retweeted my friend Julia's Kickstarter, stuff I've liked of theirs over the years (I also just happen to be reading Sandman right now). It made me realise why the recent news, rightly or wrongly, has my interest. These are two artists who have had a huge influence over my life over the years and while yes, I care about them as humans and want them to be okay and yes, I admit to daydreaming that one day I'd be a famous enough writer to move in the same social circles and my wife and I would be invited over to their house for dinner, but really, underneath all of this all I really care about is the art.

I found other stuff in my blog too. I've kind of abandoned Facebook now so don't have access to those social media memories that to be honest I used to enjoy seeing, I just don't want my data to be used by supervillains anymore. The blog had more memories than I honestly remember sharing. I thought it might be nice to just carry on posting here. Things have changed. I have two children now. I think that's partly why the blogging stopped, a lack of time and also lack of interest. After my daughter was born I ended up commuting to Croydon for work because reasons and during that sleepless, exhausting period I would maximise my writing time as much as possible. I would write for an hour on the morning train and for 45 minutes on my lunchbreak and aware that it was the only time I would have I had to make it count, so something frivolous and unlikely to move my career forward like this blog became redundant. I was also working on a webseries, Paz vs. Stuff, which involved taking on an online persona who also ran a blog and Twitter account. In the early days the plan had been to outsource the blogging and tweeting to others but like most crazy, ambitious ideas I ended up taking on the bulk of the work myself. I started a video diary on YouTube instead.

That project has finished now along with most of the other projects I had ongoing over the years. When I started this blog it was at the point where my first produced feature, Ten Dead Men, was in post-production. Around the same time I started working with a production company in Brighton and signed options on a number of scripts I had written (for no money, which at the time should have been a warning sign and yet is now standard practice). The film industry was at the height of the DVD boom, micro-budget films were being released internationally and doing well. Streaming wasn't a thing. Piracy, that would eventually lead to streaming, was very much a thing. It was a different time. I was in my late-twenties and optimistic about my future as a full-time screenwriter. It seemed like such a sure thing to me at the time that I thought this blog would be interesting to wannabe screenwriters as a chronicle of how to break into the industry (I was, despite the humble tone of my prose, rather arrogant).

I'm now 12 years on since I started the blog and many things changed, mostly for the better. I write this now from my house where I live with my wife and our two aforementioned children. I've had adventures, I've had more work produced, I've produced more of my own work which is the work I'm most proud of, I've seen many more bands, watched many more films, played a sickening amount of PS4 games. I still have a day job in an industry that is not writing-related and I still struggle with that, but compared to previous jobs I've had in the past it's really not all that bad. I'm still writing all the time although I feel much more directionless than I used to.

For example, a couple of weeks ago I decided that to get myself out of a lockdown-induced depression I would write a lockdown-based web series. It was about a filmmaker who discovers he's had the same dream in lockdown as a few other people online. He sets up a video diary service for people to record their dreams and a sinister pattern begins to emerge. I wrote a treatment and I was happy with it and it cheered me up immensely. That week I made plans to contact actors to start filming, with the idea that everyone involved could film themselves and send the footage to me to edit. Then I decided that actually, the thought of doing it had been enough and I moved onto something else. I've been doing that a lot over the last year or so, ever since I finished Paz. I'll start some similarly ambitious project, will write some of it and start making steps towards making it then I'll either decide it's too much work and quietly abandon it, or something else will come up and I'll work on that instead. I feel like screenwriting may not be the best creative outlet for me anymore, but I'm struggling to find something to replace it with. I've started and abandoned so many novels at this point I've lost count. I have two abandoned plays on my hard drive. I started a podcast with my brother about a film we were developing, both of which are abandoned (mostly through my choice), I've started planning a couple of video games but producing them requires skills I am yet to learn, I've started a couple of video game streams but never really pursued them.

So I find myself back here, on the blog I started 12 years ago and I wonder if maybe just writing this blog will be enough for now. The primary, less arrogant reason I started this blog was as a writing warm-up exercise. It was something I did for myself. This may be the first of many more posts or the last for another few years. Let's see, I guess.