Part of the reason I don’t write in my blog more often is simply that I am extremely conscious of its public nature, and I don’t tend to presume that anyone cares about my nattering enough to bother filling someone’s feed with my daily routine. Someone recently pointed out that by subscribing to a feed or adding me to their friend’s list, they show that they do in fact care, and want to read my blather.

Here’s my problem, and I think it is one that is holding back my writing in general. All writing is artifice. Every word we write is, in some sense, a pretense, a pose. I get very self-conscious about the constructed nature of my writing. I try to simply experience the scene, and record it, but I always see the wires. It makes it difficult to lose myself in the story, because I worry too much about whether or not the reader will similarly notice that the castle is merely a façade of paste and plaster.

Avoiding that self-consciousness is, I think, the key to succeeding with my writing. I feel like the writing equivalent of an anorexic, staring into a story and seeing different words, awkward words, where others insist everything is fine.