It's interesting how disconnected one can become from things. This time last year, Twitter and blogging were dominating my life. But I've missed out the last 24 hours of computer use completely. Why? I've been doing other things - teaching, some clothes shopping, meeting friends, chatting with my children. I think it's called Real Life.
On the whole it's better to have a Real Life than a Virtual one. However, it's also easy to slip away from writing. One day goes by, then another, and soon it's been a whole week without writing. Then a month. The project languishes. The longer it's left to languish, the further away it becomes. It can get so far away that the guilt about not finishing turns into vague regret for things left undone.
I've been there. I spent the first 20 years or so of wanting to be a writer not doing much writing. Lots of first chapters and unfinished short stories are stuffed into a box file on the top of a cupboard, all of which were allowed to fade away. The good news is that the situation is easily reversed. You just have to put guilt, regret, whatever to one side and get writing. The more you write, the more you want to write and the easier it becomes (a bit like exercise, so I've been told). So here's my blog post for today, later than usual, but not forgotten.
