“If I waited for perfection I would never write a word” – Margaret Atwood

So for some time I have been tip toeing around wishing to write not knowing what to write.  I started a blog maybe 2 years ago, it was awful, it wasn’t about anything.  I started one last month about moving to another country, it was dull, not that moving to a new country was dull, the writing was dull, practical and informative….dry.

So I was looking for inspiration to start again, after a friend from university began to blog, (basically procrastinating, I mean I’ve only been doing that for the last what 4 or 5 years, what is a few hours more?) I saw this quote from Margaret Atwood.  And that is when I decided to write.

Atwood inspired me to read, I was introduced to The Handmaid’s Tale at 16 and have never stopped reading I was awful at English at school, I’d always written and read, I had a typewriter for Christmas aged 4 or 5 and made books for my mother.  But English at School never caught me, until Atwood, she was new, honest different.  So Atwood inspired me to pursue English to do my degree, and then I stopped, but here she is inspiring me to pick up my pen (keyboard) once more.

But there was still that one question, kind of important really, what on Earth am I going to write about?  Well it finally seemed obvious to me, write what you know, write what you love, this is what you continually hear. What I love is BOOKS.  I love to write, I love to read, I also love the smell of books, but that is probably an irrelevant and somewhat private matter.

Do I love to read everything?  No, not by a long shot, I’ll be honest from the start, I never finished Crime and Punishment, there I said it, it was too long, too dense, too boring I am sorry but there it is, of course this is my opinion alone. I love the Brontë’s, I love Wuthering Heights, I adore Jane Eyre, Villette bored me to tears, I could not stand Lucy Snowe, I did not care what fate became her.

So will this be a profound blog about the joys of canonical literary classics? Sometimes yes, if that is what I have been reading, if that is what is currently on my mind.  But if that week I have been reading Talking to Addison by Jenny Colgan, I will write about that.  I won’t pretend to be a high brow only kind of reader.  I read Dickens and Austen and Eliot, I also read absolute trash.  And I’ll come clean from the start what I mostly read, is Science Fiction.  My favourite book?  We’ll save that for another day.