This post was written a few weeks ago, late one night. I posted it here and took it down a few days after. It felt not yet complete. However, after updated the look and feel of this blog, I figured I'd see if was able to finish my thoughts in this post. Turns out it was finished after all. I guess it somehow didn't feel right to me to talk of new beginnings yet. Now, with a re-designed blog and some more time to ponder things, I once again share these thoughts on writing and this blog.
The silence is only disturbed by the faint sound of children playing down the street and the odd car passing by. I am babysitting as I write this. The girl and boy are both asleep. Tea has been made and I long to take a sip, but it is still too hot.
I've been thinking a lot about my work as a writer these days. Times are changing, magazine after magazine is discontinued here in The Netherlands. Even though I don't write for most of them, I can still feel something shifting. Changes are not all bad though. As Joost always says, if the industry changes, you just have to change the way you work and the way you get work.
This thought has been in my mind a lot lately. And as I sit here, waiting for the kids to wake up so we can play, I wonder what I have to change. What part of my job has to evolve next. What I'd like to do most, is take matters in my own hands. Be even less dependent on someone else's need for text and create my own. My own words, my own work.
That got me thinking about this place. This blog has been an outlet in that sense for quite some time. Of and on I have written here about everyday things, my transition from a 9-to-5-er to a freelancer and so on. Mostly though, there have been images, photographs of my days. And even though they say that a photo says more than a thousand words, I'm not sure if mine have said that much, if anything at all.
This place has held my photographs, as do the files on my computer and the photos that I have uploaded on Flickr. But a true documentation of everyday life, I'm not sure if that has been the case so far.
As I contemplate what I want my next step as a freelancer writer to be, I realise that I want to do more. As in being more actively involved in what I do. Write more for the sake of writing, for the sake of documenting and telling stories. I find that after a year and a half trying to learn the ropes as a freelancer, I have lost sight of the real joy in writing. It has become a task and that is something I will try to turn around. Even though it sometimes is a task and bills need to be paid, I can always choose to see it as one, or to merely let it be an activity that I enjoy doing.
And isn't it so that what you enjoy, is what makes time fly?
Even more so than standing still?
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