Conorthoughts

Getting my life as a writer going again

My therapist Michael said that I really do need to get my writing going again.
Rather than writing something then seeing where I could get it published, I thought that I would try to get some articles commissioned, then write them.
I emailed Patricia Bickers, editor of Art Monthly in London. I wrote reviews for the magazine for a couple of years, my God, over ten years ago.

Dear Patricia,

hello. I have recently moved back to London. I would like to do some writing for you again. Might that be possible?
Since finishing a Ph.D. in 2000 I have written very little (well, a certain amount of scribbling but nothing remotely finished) and have published almost nothing, just one article in fact, last year, on residential property prices in Budapest!
I burnt myself out finishing the thesis and have been in a prolonged depression ever since. But this has been gradually unwinding. Realising that my life in Dublin was going nowhere and having the courage to come back here have been important steps in the unwinding, and being back here is helping further.
If you were interested, I don't know what I could write but I do need to get my writing going again, and some work from you would go a long way.
With Best Wishes,
Conor
78340529

Dear Conor,

Welcome back to London. We are in the very happy position of being oversubscribed with writers at present and though we try to share the commissions fairly and fit the right person with the right show/subject/issue, there never seems to be enough space or time to fit everyone in. We also commission some time in advance, now that we can call upon so many good writers, so although there is nothing immediate, there might be in the future.
Best wishes,
Patricia.

You can try to win them all over but you can't win them all.

A bit of textual analysis. This is a no. All but the first sentence 'Welcome back to London' reads like a standard response to enquiries to the magazine from prospective writers, where the answer is in the negative. Patricia has, I assume, pasted the rest of the email from elsewhere. The standard response also comes in handy, it would seem, for the odd former writer reappearing out of the woodwork.

Advice from Beatrix Joyce (my niece)

I just came across by chance an email from Bea that I hadn't seen. I missed it over the summer while switching email software, from Microsoft Outlook to Thunderbird. I wish that Bea would start a blog. That would get me going here. I paste her email.

Hey Conor,

I read your blog. It was OK. You know Conor, why don't you try to do something exciting, you know. Something like dramatically saving someone's life, by jumping off a cliff while he was falling and magically flying. That would be a great story instead of looking for a place in London! Otherwise, if you haven't dramatically saved someone's life, try to make it funny or interesting! Talk about how you feel at that very moment, what you want to achieve in life, and why you think philosophy is good. I should know. I kept a diary for months, at first it was interesting, but then all I wrote about was what I did. It's much more interesting to write about how you feel and stuff. If something, however, does dramatically happen, don't forget to write it down. But also write how you felt when it happend, and what could have happened.

Also, try to look for an adventure! Don't sit and wait for it to come. And write books about what you've done and felt and stuff. You'll be a best seller in no time!

Keep the blog up to date so that I can read it!

Love,

B or Bea or Beatrix, as long as it is not Be!

The post of mine to which Bea was referring is this one.

The absence of the body in blogging

My friend Paul hasn't replied to what I wrote on his blog in my previous post. In it I was trying to write something about the nature of blogging as a form of communication. Perhaps it doesn't have a nature. I am going to continue for the moment as if it had.

Lost but determined, I decided to stumble on in the dark looking for light elsewhere. I went to the Technorati search engine, typed in "nature of online communication" and came across an interesting post from early this year entitled 'reflections on communication'. It was written by the_tower, a student of Chinese, Psychology and Japanese at the University of California at Berkeley (I give the link only below at the end, wanting you to read this through rather than jump now to Berkeley).

I am going to keep this short as one of my main intentions in writing is to try to elicit a response from the_tower and I am not sure whether I can alert him to this post. I don’t want to have wasted much time, if I find that I have wasted it.

the_tower bemoans the absence of other people’s physical presence in online communication. Without facial expressions and gestures to read and without visual cues generally it is, he writes, difficult to interpret correctly what people say. The result can be misunderstanding, taking things up the wrong way, a breakdown in communication.

What most interests me in the_tower’s thoughts is the sense he gives of how the other person, or other people, are almost present. Online communication, blogging in particular, has the form of a conversation between two or more people, even if it is not, literally, a conversation. It is virtually (in the sense of 'almost' ) one. There is a desire for an immediate response, for the other’s, or others’, presence. Are you there?

Here is the_tower’s post.