dear blog

*whistles* Hello? Is anyone still out there? Good. Nice to see you again, guys. If you're wondering, that is in fact the longest I've been without blogging since I started this shenanigan over a year ago.

It felt weird to be away, let me tell you.

There's no real reason why I haven't been blogging, no drama or sudden need to leave the country, our internet connection didn't die a spectacular death or anything like that. To be honest, it would take a lot more than fire, famine and general pestilence to keep me from blogging if I wanted to. I guess I just didn't want to.

You see, when I write, something I do a lot of, I tend to back myself into a corner. I start out trying to explain myself and end up bringing myself down. Writing helps, don't get me wrong, there's nothing like expressing yourself and all that jazz but... good news doesn't sell, ask any journalist, and it's far too easy for me to dwell on the negative when I blog.

I started a diary at the beginning of January. The week after I became a Christian I went to WHSMiths and got a purple, suede-backed journal with nice cream pages. I opened it at a random page and wrote the date of my spiritual birthday, where and how it happened and who I was with at the time. I started writing stuff in it, prayers and bible verses, bits about people I was worried about, people I wanted to get saved and things like that.

It lasted about a month. Then I got bored (as I do so well) and lazy (as I do even better) and I stopped writing in it. I can't remember when I started writing in it again, but I remember what I wrote, on the first page, my intention to fill the whole book and that I didn't care how many years it took.

As it happened, it took just over two.

So, now I have a new book, for those things I can't and shouldn't write on here, for those things that other people aren't allowed to see yet. Yet. It's always been my intention that some well-meaning and dashingly handsome chap will one day discover my writings and turn them into bestselling novel/arty film/moving Rachel Corrie style piece of theatre at which point everyone will think I'm post-humously great. Just wait.

I can't write without a reader. I can put words together, make scratches on paper and hit keys but to actually write something, you have to imagine someone reading it. The last couple of weeks I've been writing for a reader that doesn't matter, whoever reads this diary (and I hope like hell it's not anyone while I'm alive because I'd have to kill them) means nothing to me so I can finally be uncensored.

Being completely uninhibited in the stuff I write each day has been really good for me, but I miss blogging too much to stop. Blogging is gratifying in a very different way, one isn't better than the other, I don't need one more than the other. But I need to know where one ends and the other begins.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm going to try and vent on here less. I will always be honest on this blog, I won't ever spare you the gory details because I know that it's the gory details that make life fun. But this is a place for me to write, not a place for me to cry for help and, maybe, I should be keeping my cries to myself from now on.