Blogging or not blogging? I am still pondering the question. I am not sure I can write regularly, and do something meaningful with it. Part of reluctance comes from the idea that I should spend my limited available time writing fiction, short stories, finishing my novel, reviewing and preparing for submissions, rather than blogging.

That infers that blogging is a kind of inferior writing, something not quite as serious. And somewhere it’s true: bloggers feel more free, less constrained. It’s a nice way to procrastinate, with the illusion that it loosens up our writing ability, or that it stimulates the creative brain. Well, maybe it does.

It is a social game too. You add a brick to your blog, answer to other blogs, ask questions and get answers from readers. It’s so different from writing fiction where you are alone and the potential reader is absent. The danger is that it’s very time- and energy-consuming, and sometimes doesn’t go anywhere. It’s not like the feeling of achievement you get from finishing a draft of a short story, a chapter of a novel. 

I only read blogs about literature, writing or reading books. It’s always meshed together with the private life of bloggers but blogs as private diaries don’t interest me. Indeed I sometimes yield to the weakness of voyeurism, but I want to keep away from this as much as possible.

Sometimes I believe that curiosity about the quirks of writers’ lives belongs to the same voyeurism. Maybe not in the Anglo-Saxon world where writing is more of a democratic craft and people want to share tips and techniques. But definitely on the French writing scene where the Writer is a superior being, lonely in his ivory tower and separated from the vulgar crowd that merely read the produce of his brain. In most French literary magazines you have a page with pictures of a famous writer’s house, with a close-up on the desk. It’s always very romantic. It offers a visual representation of the chaos out of which deep, meaningful masterpieces are created. It is so cliché. Literary interviews always ask: where do you write? How do you write?, as if it said something more of the books quality. I guess that if you just write sitting on a desk and typing at your standard PC, some of the magic is lost and you don’t really have the Writer’s persona that French people venerate. That’s how I explain that writers like Amélie Nothomb are so famous regardless of what they write. They’re banking on their eccentric persona to get media attention.

Well, this got me quite far from my original subject.

When I was in Beijing I started a blog, but soon abandoned it. I felt lonely, I used it as a personal place to put things I liked: like a shelf of miscellanea. There were daily scenes of Beijing life, art, writing etc. But I soon discovered that I had no motivation to put these things in the open. Now I think that I want a place of my own in this strange space, to react to the blogs I love to read, to exchange and put things “out there”.