There and Back Again

It has been more than a year since I last wrote and published an article on my website. Due to the pandemic, I chose to become an essential worker at a local food coop, and it became my full-time job. Despite the difficulties at work, which are ongoing, I was able to build some good relationships with people there. Whilst I have found the constant and demanding engagement with work challenging, having left me unable to do much with scarce time for myself, I have arrived at a conclusion: the only way to meet the ongoing test of satisfactorily handling shifting problems in life is to do more. Not just for the job, but for myself.

To be clear, I have been engaging with my other project, namely, my first fiction, which is supposedly the first book of a trilogy. I have made good progress on this front despite myself, with the generous help of an expert reader in the inimitable Anna Ezekiel. (Please do yourself a favour and follow her work at: @AnnaEzekiel1, or https://acezekiel.com/! She is an expert on Karoline von Günderrode. She has a few books forthcoming from Oxford.) I have been embracing the process despite the unstable connection to the voices of the characters. Still, there had been times when they had left me stranded for longer than I liked.

This site came to be due to two epiphanies. The first was the moment when I realised how many things had broken down during the global pandemic, and how much had I lost personally. I shall spare you from the details, for everyone has been going through a lot on one’s own, yet the realisation of just how much had been lost in a span of a year or so put my ‘life’ in stark light. This was when I realised that I had to try to get back to what I loved: thinking and writing critically. In addition, writing and publishing with some regularity would help with my long-term project of writing fiction.

The second instance came when I happened to come across a blog article from the good people at Ulysses GmbH. It demonstrated to me the way in which someone can write and publish on a website with astounding efficiency. Time and energy have always been in short supply for yours truly, yet with the current and ongoing challenges related to work, I needed to take a hard look at how had I been doing so little. The result so far is promising: I was able to migrate my entire website to Ghost within a day. To be sure, I needed to invest my hard-earned income for such an incredible level of ease and efficiency by signing up to a new platform, but that’s what a job is for. Besides, Ghost has offered me the best online publishing experience by far. Aside from the seamless integration with the writing tool of my choice, it is light and responsive. There is no clutter that saps away my already scarce time and vitality. It made even code injection to add certain functions effortless.

I have no illusion as to the prospect of rebuilding relationships with people I used to have stable contact with. Whilst the realisation won’t stop me from trying, I won’t be surprised if you decide not to rekindle: I cannot really promise that my newest endeavour will produce a consistent output that deserves your attention.

No matter. There and back again. Despite everything, it is good to be here.