The right kind of interesting

Hi, everyone. Yes, I’m back at last. Sort-of…

Many apologies for the long gap, anyway - and thank you all so much for still being here.

Almost seven months since the last time I was able to write here. A lot of things going on in the meantime - a lot of ‘the wrong kind of interesting’, we might say. Too much of the wrong kind of change - including packing up and moving house, not just once, but twice, each time required to erase my existence from that part of the world. A strange feeling, that.

And more, and more. Given some of what went on, I’m lucky there was no time spent in a wheelchair - but there was certainly a lot of time sat in an armchair, unable to do much more than contemplate in futility the nature of the world, and the ever-increasing absurdity of most people’s flat-out refusal to face up to now-inevitable change on a global scale. Oh well.

For me, though, the real struggle was with Long-COVID. I’d had a brief bout of COVID just before Christmas last year, just a couple of days after signing a contract with a major publisher to do a new edition of one my existing books. I seemed to recover quickly, back out of bed in a couple of days, and already back to writing before the holiday season had ended. Yet slowly, insidiously, it became clear that something was seriously wrong. My ability to write dropped, and dropped, and dropped again: a post here that used to take a couple of hours was, by April, taking a couple of days or more, and getting worse and worse by the week. Deadlines for the book whooshed by, and then whooshed by once - something that had never happened before in my already-long professional life. Not good.

That’s Long-COVID. It didn’t affect my ability to think, or create. Instead, it affected - more like crippled - my ability to structure what I was thinking, to get it down on paper into any usable, readable form. For a writer, yeah, that’s hell indeed…

Piled on top of everything else that was going on at the time, it was ‘interesting times’, all right: ‘the wrong kind of interesting’. A relentless daily dance to prevent a spiralling collapse into a space that would definitely be no fun at all.

It’s taken me seven months to claw my way back to here - and there’s probably still quite a long way to go before I can get fully back to speed. But it’s time now to get out of that armchair, and, as best I can, get back to work.

And thank you all again for being here, when I could not.

I’m back now. Still limping, metaphorically, but I’m back.

There’s a lot of work to do, to use ‘small changes’ to help everyone reach out towards ‘the right kind of interesting’ for this world of ours. Let’s have fun doing it, for everyone’s sake!

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