We’ve had a rainy, cold weekend, and the temperatures plummeted from 35°C to 19° in 24 hours. I’d done more than my fair share of writing and needed a creative diversion.
Enter my brother, an artist who recently decided that if AI is going to put him out of a job (if your can call it a job, as it pays very little), he wants to know more about it. We played on dreamstudio.ai all weekend, and came up with a gazillion AI-inspired works. I’m especially proud of my ‘self-portrait’. Or AI portrait. I’m not sure who gets the credit for it.
My brother, an artist, has fallen in love with a Russian woman. But he lives in South Africa while she lives in Russia. And, as an artist, he will probably never be able to travel to meet this muse that has become his inspiration.
He decided to paint her portrait, but now he cannot send it to Russia. No courier service will deliver.
I ask myself that question when I stare at the blank box that demands to be filled.
It’s not because I feel the need to write, because I already produced 1500 new words in my daily writing schedule this morning. And I will review it after lunch. Perhaps I blog because I paid for wordpress for the next year, so I need to use it. Please, God, let this not be like a gym subscription that I never use. Fortunately, opening my laptop or swiping my phone to the wordpress app is not as horrifying as squeezing into a leotard and bouncing up and down to insanity-fuelled music. If it can be called music. So I write to alleviate couch guilt, that malady of writers who prefer to write instead of doing aerobics or housework or visiting friends. In February 2022, I became what I always wanted to be: a Fulltime Writer. And blogging is just another form of writing.
I have no desire to have multitudes read my posts, but I enjoy reading the posts of other writers. Even if it is just to try figure out why they blog if they are already writing novels and short stories and poetry. I definitely am not trying to get other bloggers to “buy my book”.
Who knows? Maybe there are others out there who, like me, blog because it beats doing the laundry or weeding. And every fulltime writer knows that it’s almost impossible to write for 8 hours a day. We need time to think. We need time to allow our characters and plots to simmer in the background in preparation for the next writing stint.
So, here is my first “real” blog post. It took as long to write as it takes me to drink a cup of coffee, and I’ll admit that it was almost as satisfying.
dorothy de kok 