Moving On

I've learnt a lot from having this site but it's time to move on and practice my writing skills elsewhere.

The Life Box

In the garage I keep a box to store all kinds of things I've managed to hang on to since I was a boy; odds and sods as we used to call them. Besides birthday cards, many of these are things from primary or secondary school: newsletters, exercise books, drawings from art lessons and so on.

Do you ever wonder what people are including in that "and so on" bit at the end of a list? Is it just more of the same or are they hoping to get away with hiding some dirty washing there? Let's have a poke around in my smalls...

Hmmm, what are these lumps of wood or metal? Er, they represent time spent - or wasted - in lessons we called Craft. See that roughly oval block of wood with a sort of dip in the centre? I think was supposed to be a fruit bowl.

For a single item of fruit.

Imagine a banana reclining lazily on a wooden lilo and you'll get the general impression.

Next is what looks like a giant mis-shaped fork with two wide tines. This was my invention of a tool to remove mud from between the studs on football boots. Unfortunately after dipping the molten metal in hot plastic to coat the handle, it slipped from the tongs and bounced off the floor.

I like to think that somewhere in the multiverse there exists a version of me, renowned as the Sir Clive Sinclair of football boot cleanliness.

Hey Steve, is there a point to this story?

Okay, so there were things at school that I was terrible at and I've kept the evidence. But there were some subjects I was good at, so enjoyed. Or is it enjoyed, so was good at?

My early primary school books are full of drawings of spaceships, dinosaurs, dragons and castles. Later I started to write stories. There were dinosaurs, dragons and spaceships in most of those too, clearly influenced by Doctor Who, Thunderbirds and Gerry Anderson's UFO series.

I often didn't know how to finish a story, so they either stopped abruptly or with the most cliched ending ever: "and then I woke up". Almost all of them have a comment in red from my teacher, "very good, but what happened next".

Things changed when I was ten. We'd been taught about the Spanish Armada and how, after the battle with the Royal Navy, the remainder of the fleet had to sail around Scotland and Ireland to return to Spain. For some reason this fired my imagination and I completed an epic 12 page story from the perspective of a Spanish doctor on one of the ships. For the first time one of my stories won an award and was pinned on the wall of the class.

Reading it now, it makes me kinda sad to see the level of imagination that my ten year-old self had. Nowadays I sit at the keyboard writing blog posts, struggling for inspiration and to write half as well.

At secondary school there wasn't much call for creative writing. I wrote a 40 page essay for History class on Arthurian legend but that was about as far as it went. The school curriculum was designed to create workers for industry and business, not artists and novelists.

Time to Move On

As my few but loyal regular readers will know, one of my plans on retirement was to do some writing, ideally a book. I've not had much time so far to work on that but the idea of having this site was to at least get used to writing in a less formal way than I did while working.

Trouble is, the only people who know this site exists are friends and family. That limits what I can write about to the type of things you might be interested in. There are only so many posts I can write about decorating, gardening and DIY, since that's pretty much all I've done in the last two years. Lots of pottering around but thankfully not with a baggy cardigan. Yet.

To attract readers to long-form blogging, especially when the average person is more interested in ten word posts and videos on social media, is almost impossible. I'd have to spend ages on promotion and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and that just takes time away from content.

Another reason is that my subscription for this site shortly runs out. Renewing it isn't cheap and isn't justified with the amount of time I use it, so it will transition to a free site with advertising once it runs out. Eventually I will close it down.

A New Medium

The good news is that I'm already posting on a platform called Medium, which exists for writers and readers. It means I have over 100 million readers to reach, and lots of other writers to learn from.

You can find my new site at https://baggiecardie.com/ Articles I publish should be available without creating an account. I have lists of articles from other members that I've saved but you'll need to sign up for an account to read those.

Thanks for staying with me on this journey and I hope you'll follow me to the new home.